TONAL MAGIC

  In a quit suburb of the otherwise busting city of Ahmedabad, stands a country houses that combines readily-available India and Western materials, with surprisingly uncommon results. This fusion creates a warmth usually associated with rural cottages the world over, all the while maintaining the chic style and modern comforts of a town house.

As you park your car over the rough Kota flagstones and walk through the house’s wooden-floored pergola-covered entrance, you notice the heightened use of naturally occurring indigenous material on the exterior. This material is everywhere-in the central courtyard that echoes the Kota on the outside, the slate and central courtyard that echoes the Kota on the outside, the slate and Kota stone-clad columns, it seems, merges with the great outdoors. From this space, a long wooden corridor leades to the main house.

One step up, and you move from the warmth of the outdoor, to the freshness of the 1,500 sq ft indoor the transition is smooth, achieved simply by using unobtrusive, large, ivory-colored vitrified tiles on the floor. The lustre of the tiles opens up the space, while the furniture, in solid dark wood and beige upholstery, another room and gives it depth. “Tiles represent a departure from the veined look that natural stone gives, giving a cleaner definition,” says architect Hiren Patel of Faith Interior Design cell, Hiren Patel Architects, the architecture and interior design company that was commissioned for the job. Tiles, in fact, play an important role inside the home, accenting even the center tables in the living room, with their brown glass mosaic embedded into wood.

The living room, the area where the family comes together, is literally the heart of the house. Almost to enhance its position, it is raised a few inches off the ground, and is covered with tiny glass mosaic tiles in black and magenta, making it look closer and warm then the other spaces in the houses. The floor is strewn with cushions and the furniture is low, to set area apart from the surrounding rooms that otherwise seem to flow into each other through large openings and glass walls.

“Tiles in the family room haven been used not just for graphic effect, but for texture. We have not given in to the tendency to overdo the mosaic tiles, in term of colour, but have used them for controlled glamour,” elaborates Hiren. The country aesthetic of design is brought about by the rough appearance created by smaller tiles, due to denser grouting. The look is heightened by frameless glass that connects the indoor to the outside world.

Leading away from the family room is the bedroom on one side and the kitchen on the other, both with the same ivory vitrified tile floor found in the drawing room. Additionally, the kitchen walls are clad in caramel-coloured glazed tiles. The passage between the kitchen and the living room is done in glass, serving a dual role as a display gallery and a connecting corridor between two courtyards. Adjoining this corridor, is the Puja room. The single bathroom on the ground floor mirror the dense colour in the family room-vitrified white tiles bordered with a magenta glass mosaic, and black for the vanity counter.

A wooden staircase with glass railing leads to the timber-floored library that opens into a large terrace, done in white china mosaic tiles, to reflect the heat off the building. Broken and pieced together, almost like a jigsaw, the uneven tiles from a self-pattern, and capture the design team’s vision of the house-subtle in appearance, yet experimental in its use of materials.

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