Birch And Beautiful

The Birch Ply House is a magnificent attempt to craft a home with a great sense of rootedness and timeless appeal from a material palette that is simple and limited with a studious avoidance of all forms of artifice.

- Ramya Srinivasan

When an architect designs a home for himself, excessive eagerness can sometimes lead to profuse opulence with discordant elements struggling to co-exist in awkwardness. However, while designing the Birch Ply House, architect Mahek Lalan, SML Architects, did not fall into any such entrapment. As he set out to design his apartment, he chose to avoid “a surfeit of surface finishings and embellishments.”

His minimalistic approach which eliminated any obfuscation in design has resulted in a home with a definite character of its own.

Lalan explains, “The Birch Ply House takes a conscious step to form an abode of calm and restraint through an extreme paring down of the palette to a few basic materials.”He cites two reasons for this approach - the first is that the apartment is a small two-bedroom one, measuring a mere 800 sq ft. So, the minimalistic template worked in its favour by making the space appear expansive. The second is an attempt to keep away from adding components that are frame-worthy, but really quite fake.