Villa Prakriti
Villa Prakriti
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ARCHITECTS
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DESIGN TEAM
Vibhu Viraj,kavya Shah, Maanika Gupta
LEAD ARCHITECTS
Gauri Satam And Tejesh Patil
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
Kavya Shah And Untag
ENGINEERING & CONSULTING > OTHER
Papaya Nursery
GENERAL CONSTRUCTING
Vn Developers And Builders
ENGINEERING & CONSULTING > STRUCTURAL
Deltacom
PHOTOGRAPHS
Pranit Bora
AREA
4500 Ft²
YEAR
2024
LOCATION
Igatpuri, India
CATEGORY
Houses
Text description provided by architect.
Prakriti, in Sanskrit, refers to "mother nature". Cradled amidst India's Sahyadri mountains, flanked by forest at its backside, while overlooking Mukane dam, Villa Prakriti is a quaint biophilic farm-house reciting the connect between humans and nature.
This forested sanctuary seeks not to mimic nature, but to live in its likeness — to be adaptive, procreative, and rooted. A home that blends into its natural surroundings.
The first seed of thought germinated under the existing lone mango tree, which formed the instinctual nucleus — the axis mundi. Traversing the home on a contoured topography becomes an act of choreography, negotiating levels, unravelling spaces.
Instead of flattening the ground into terraces, the house treads gently along it — a minimal cut-fill philosophy respecting the natural gradient.
The spatial configuration splits into two wings around the tree — one public, one private, plugged through the mango court. The home is accessed through a meandering entrance stair, orchestrating a lyrical rise through a tropical green thicket.
The stair lands onto a brick-floored entrance canopy, greeted by the Mango tree, dappled by filtered light through a bamboo pergola.
The living is envisaged as a transient threshold connecting front and rear landscapes. The Living opening to the south is protected by a 10-deep verandah, terminating as a trapezoidal pool framing the Sahyadris.
The defining element of the Living is the organic planter-bed, which moulds into a built-in seat, with an elliptical skylight above. A sculptural indoor spiral stair, born through another thicket of greens, leads you to the upper bedroom.
The other three bedrooms constituting the private wing are straddled at three levels, negotiated by outdoor stairs, interspersed with greens.
At Prakriti, one can feel the forest breathing within and around the home through its multiple biophilic gestures, be it visual, olfactory, or auditory.
Metaphorical to an earthy creature born from the Sahyadris' fertile soil, the home with its terracotta hues, gives birth to the various green offspring.
Designed with climatically sensitive solar passive strategies, the home with two sloping roofs and deep overhangs, shades the harsh sun through its verandahs and balconies, and brings in diffused light through its brick jaalis.
Habitable spaces are cross-ventilated, ensuring a year-round thermal comfort. Additionally, the clay tile roofs ensure the natural escape of hot air.
Local Brick —honest, textural, and timeless— is used extensively, instilling warmth and tactility. Native, cost-effective Shahabad stone is laid in various patterns throughout the home.
The traditional clay tile roof evokes contextual rootedness, taking clues from the regional building techniques. Ethnic indoor aesthetics within a bare-basic white shell lend a sense of warm Indianness to the spaces.
Every solution, right from massing to architectural detailing to conscious material choices, is made to achieve an ecologically and economically sustainable design.
The site's architecture and landscape together blur the boundary between built and unbuilt, restoring ecological memory and inviting the forest to reclaim its continuity.
This is architecture in its most elemental form, a way of listening, inhabiting, co-existing, and ever-evolving.
