WALLMAKERS

VINU DANIEL OF WALLMAKERS SOUGHT THE EARTH'S COUNSEL TO BUILD CHUZHI - A MALAYALAM WORD THAT TRANSLATES TO "SPIRAL". A HOUSE SUNK INTO A ROCKY BED AND COVERED BY A CANOPY OF TAMARIND TREES, IT IS A SINCERE STATEMENT OF SUSTAINABILITY AND STAYING TRUE TO THE ORIGIN OF THE SITE ON WHICH IT STANDS.

- RAJASHREE BALARAM

The word chuzbi in Malayalam means "spiral". For anyone unfamiliar with the language, the deceptively simple word may seem easy enough to pronounce; the arrangement of letters in English seems to indicate something akin to "choosy". But the authentic pronunciation of the Dravidian word is nowhere as simple as that; it demands a rolling back of the tongue and then tipping it to the roof of the mouth to produce convoluted phonetics that sound more like an uneasy friction between R and L.

The structure of Chuzhi House, designed by Vinu Daniel, has a fitting complexity to match its name-starting from the very origins of the site on which it stands. Situated in a gated community called Sanctity Ferme in the picturesque Shoolagiri in Tamil Nadu, the 2,122square-foot space is a case study in sheer defiance-of what can be built on odd sites that are mostly dismissed as "unsuitable" for construction.

"The realtor, a friend of mine, was in a fix as there were unwanted obscure plots at the periphery of the community, charactropography, huge terized by steep rocky trees, and deciduous vegetation. This made people reluctant to construct homes there as the buildable area seemed less," says Daniel, who won AD's Sustainability Award in 2022 and the "Best Earth Builder" award at this year's Wallpaper* Design Awards. "When I first saw the site, all I could think of was that a building could hide in there."