Choreography Of Space

Coimbatore-based WARP create A House of Small Talks — a home that establishes a dialogue with its adjacency as well as internally on a micro scale, through an exercise of stacking and skewing volumetric functionalities.

- Rupali SebaStian

Out-of-the-box creations, often, don’t involve reinventing the wheel. They can be an outcome of a small, yet crucial, change — which itself is a result of looking at an established norm from a different perspective. A House of Small Talks is one such example of challenging the stereotype.

The site nestles within a crowded neighbourhood in Coimbatore, where dense urbanization has created a matrix of predicable residential blocks. For city-based architectural and design firm Wallsmith Architectural Research and Practice (WARP), this ‘sameness’ became the genesis of creating a programme that was removed from the usual. “On account of rapid urbanization and gentrification of Indian cities, construction and design typologies of houses have become more and more formulaic based on the locally prevailing trends and thus losing their connection with the ‘neighbour’ and the ‘nature’… Our design tries to create dialogues between, the house and its neighbourhood and the spaces in-between: built and un-built. Within the precinct; dialogue of the inhabitants and spaces,” elucidate WARP founders Pradeep Arumugam (CEO) and Shanil Riyaz (Design Head). This strategy was aligned to the company’s core design philosophy of ‘sculpting simple design parcels with a strong belief in geometry and nature.’

The client brief was rather simple, something that every Indian household requires: formal and informal spaces, comfortable bedrooms… The only deviation was they desired a pooja room to be visible from all spaces — an architectural embodiment of the divine blessing to all corners of the home.