The Architect's Personal Playground

The Drift House on Little Much Farm, Maharashtra

- Shriti Das

The Drift House on Little Much Farm, nestled in the Western Ghats of Maharashtra pushes the envelope of good design; from the customary prerequisites of site topography, climate, landscape, and vistas; to furthering it with a play within the form, function, and features in the home created for the architect herself.

Few vocations allow room for play as architecture and design do. At the risk of offending its auxiliaries and contemporaries or hero-worshipping the architectural fraternity and practice; few occupations endow joys like scribbling and doodling on blank canvases, which then take the form of buildings, products or objects. Or composing design models with a heady mix of play, strategy, and manipulation. And the awareness that a single line can not only divide spaces but control human behavior and patterns. While this realization or declaration may deem architects puppeteers, masterminds of the human psyche or probable conspirators, often, the architects’ work is reduced to, sadly, just work and little play akin to most vocations.

Long-drawn trysts with the drawing board and models are a luxury that few architects enjoy unless it is the case of a personal undertaking or perhaps a god-sent client who can afford the time and pander to their architects’ utopian aspirations. But with the latter, there still exist limitations and challenges that do not translate to the aforementioned poetics of architecture. The former, however, can vary between two extremes; it can translate into a canvas of unending possibilities or indifference towards one’s own undertaking. Luckily, it is the former that transpires with most designers when they embark on projects that they build for themselves.