A TRANQUIL TREAT

reD Architects transform a cluster of apartments into a palatial home for close knit family of four in Delhi

- EKTA PAREKH

 All architects dream of building structures from scratch to garner appreciation for their functional and aesthetical brilliance, but sometimes (mostly always), life has other plans. Today, The Watercourt House is a singular, spanking residence of a family located in the quiet bylanes of Vasant Vihar, Delhi, but that is not how it was when we first saw it. Myself, including Rajiv Parekh and Maithili Raut met with it as a three-storey apartment building on stilts, with a four bedroom home on each floor and its floor plates abutting the compound walls. Sometimes as we did in this home, architects have to put on the cap of a skilled negotiator and mediator, finding hacks along the way.

Our foremost concern was establishing a connection between all floors—the basement, the stilt level, and the top three storeys. Given the buckets of light, the capital city of Delhi offers, puncturing a skylight through the floors established a visual and almost ethereal connection between the levels. However, with bright sunshine comes scorching heat, and to beat it, we built a water trough along the aperture of the skylight for insulation. The six inches of moving water in the trough created a ripple effect of light and shadow in the central courtyard as the sun changed its direction throughout the day. Furthermore, to prevent evaporation of this water and eliminate the glare, a motor-operated translucent blind closes out this opening during extreme summer.