AHAM House by i2a Architects Studio

AHAM – Architecture that is designed to touch the Soul. This 2800sqft house creates an environment that helps one to open up into the stillness within, thus helping the user to experience a truer beauty, function, and meaning in the space. Aham stands beautifully in the middle of lush greenery and mesmerizing natural beauty of Kerala, grabbing one's attention from very far itself with its traditional sloped roofing at different heights. The brief aims to revert to a grounded lifestyle setup through a design that captures the essence of being connected to one’s roots and values. The client’s understanding of the relevance of landscape and the design team’s conscious effort to integrate that with the activities inside built spaces pilot the project decisions. 

The conceptual start was to place the central courtyard as the ‘soul’ of the house which ties the rest of the house. The Car porch and sit-out area have a distinct piece of landscape inserted with an elegant backdrop of jali and terracotta tiles carefully placed. The guest living is isolated from the rest of the house with large windows, giving an expansive view of the courtyard. The passage that runs around the courtyard gives privacy as well as filter the light and wind passing through the jali screens. The informal living, dining, and kitchen spaces, are all aligned in a row, in an open plan, thus these active cores of the house remain connected to each other and open themselves to the courtyard all the time. The built form is tailored to unwind into these green pockets at numerous points, reassuring the purpose of connecting to nature in a real sense. This project is choreographed to create an open, free-flowing movement within the elements of walls and floors around the alluring central courtyard. The living space and the 2 bedrooms on the first floor are designed to cultivate a strong feeling of connection, achieved through strategical openings and cut-outs that act as uncompelled visual linkages between floors.