The clients who had bought two apartments in a beautiful central Bangalore neighbourhood asked us to make them their 'dream' House. The husband is a successful, exuberant and outgoing businessman and the wife is quiet, introverted and gentle. The Duality between their nature also manifested a duality in the brief given to us; grand and yet intimate; showy and yet humble; exuberant and yet restrained. The reality of one nature feeding the other also hit us, as they fed off each other having found a very relaxed equilibrium. The Dual House is an experiment in creating these co-existing and almost symbiotic dualities in space, in language and in materials.
At a spatial level we reconfigured the two apartments by moving the more public spaces of the house towards the north, where the soft light through the balconies overlooked onto the beautiful trees surrounding the property. These spaces were connected by two geometrical cut outs in the central bay broken between the floors. The lower floor towards the north has the formal living room and the den while the upper floor contains the more family centric AV room and the study. The cut outs were also made to unite a perceivable 'grand' central volume of this house. The cut between these cutout remained more like bridge as it spanned through this volume. The first volume from the entry also contained the staircase. All the private spaces, including the kitchen were pushed into the south, where they combined with the mass of the lift and staircase block of the apartment.
The language of the house became more intricate, as a play on duality as well as conscious effort to offset 'expensive' materials and replacing them by 'crafted' materials. This way, the high budget assigned to house went to the right people; the artisans and the craftsmen. The entire language therefore was also crafted. The large spaces also warranted an intricacy in thought to take the experience of roaming in the house from the global to the momentary.
The common physical link was an invisible grid derived from the staircase which spanned the exact width of the central space, making each step i.e. riser and tread, into the proportions which every element of the house adhered to.
In terms of the materials, this duality is expressed in contrasts of the soft and the hard, the strong and the weak, the light and the dark, the strong and the subtle, the ordered and the organic. An example of this is the central 'dance' forms above the living room made with thick steel flats threaded with soft and delicate wood which embodies the joy within and between these contrasts. It is placed in the middle of the house as it acts like a sculture in the round, a screen and as it ties all the large public spaces together.
The Dual House is a crafted effort of creating a seemingly large, grand, showy and exuberant house with its soul deeply embedded in being intimate, humble and restrained.
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