Creating intimacy in a home takes some planning

A decade ago, Delhi-based Anagram Architects fashioned a house they called Kindred House

- MANJU SARA RAJAN

It was, says the practice's principal and co-founder, architect Madhav Raman, a "halfway home", something in between a nuclear family unit and a joint family one, an innovative response to a new way of living for the Indian family. The clients in this case were "kindred nuclear families", a set of siblings and their families.

The design created multiple social spaces where people could gather, while each family also had its own specific zones. The idea was to allow for the children of the house to grow up under the care of two sets of parents, instead of just one. Raman says it was Anagram's design response to the new Indian joint family situation, where you are together but also separate.

Many people now live in places where families have inherited plots and siblings live stacked on top of one another, on different floors (this, of course, discounts most people living in Mumbai). Such homes are usually a mono block that's cut horizontally into entirely independent apartments, separated entirely by elevators. That's very different from the joint family home of our imaginations, a vast common space centred perhaps by a sweeping staircase where all the drama takes place my mind is of course cross-referencing Ekta Kapoor TV serials here.

For Kindred House, Anagram had the bedrooms at the back, while in the front of the building they created three floating volumes with a terrace garden and other social spaces where the families would have to spend time together. Instead of making just a building filled with relatives Anagram's design enabled the two family units to interact and socialise while affording privacy via intimate spaces.