Location: Vadodara, India.

Architect: Squareworks LLP / Apartment.

Amaltas is a residential retreat located on the outskirts of Vadodara City, Gujarat, India. The villa is designed to cater to the requirements of its singular inhabitant, who is a landscape architect and an environment enthusiast. The brief called for a consciously designed ecosystem, integrating multi-layered domestic spaces, coherent materiality, energy efficiency, and mobility for the elderly. The villa encompasses about 900 sq. m of area, across a 7000 sq. m plot, and features a dedicated zone designed exclusively for the solitary client, a semi-private zone for the client and her guests, a public core, and a service wing. The design also incorporates maximum vertical surfaces and niches to exhibit the client’s diverse and valuable art collection. The spatial domesticity of Amaltas caters to the surrounding invitatory landscape, interspersed courtyards, apertures for indirect daylighting, and syncretic accents of inherited, artisanal, and natural entities. The transitions between open, semi-open, and closed spaces are structured through a series of courtyards that enable natural ventilation and day-lighting. The villa features a branched layout with axial routes for circulation, contiguous disjuncture, subdued liminality, hierarchy of spaces, transparency, asymmetry, climatic buffers, composite structure, and integrity of natural entities and phenomena. The built form demonstrates wide peripheral verandahs towards the South and West-facing surfaces enveloping the internal annexes, which radiate outwards from the formal center of the space. The transitions maintain a convergence of functions and activities, allowing spaces to fluidly merge into one another without confining the extents of built and unbuilt. The spaces follow a progressive pattern, unveiling a series of transitions from closed to open and public to private. The design features a palette of materials that involve specific yet diverse constituents, in a way that the resultant space can be envisaged to senesce with time, embracing the transient instinctive decadence. The residence resonates with an autonomy that governs each space to function independently, yet coherently.

Photo credit: Fabien Charuau.