Jain Heights

What you are looking at

The images on this page are 3D visualisations of the design rather than photographs of a finished apartment.

The first runs the length of an open plan. On the left, a wall of board-formed concrete panels carries the television. The tie holes and joint lines are left visible. Under it stands a long console on lathe-turned wooden legs. Its front is inset with panels of blue and white patterned tile. A timber breakfast counter separates that side from the kitchen. The L-shaped kitchen has handleless shutters, white metro tile and a splashback in blue and white. It also has open timber shelves and a glass pendant over the counter. The dining table is solid timber on a trestle base, set beside full-height glazed doors in timber frames.

The second is the living area, framed by exposed brick piers and two lathe-turned timber columns. A teak storage and display wall runs down one side. Beside it, a concrete pier carries three hand-painted blue and white tiles. A puja niche nearby is backlit behind a lotus fretwork screen.

The third is a bathroom, in fan-shaped scallop tile. It has a carved stone vessel basin on a teak vanity, and an ogee-arched timber mirror. A brass shower column stands over a floor of patchwork vintage-pattern tile.

The moves

Three material families recur and hold the rooms together: concrete and stone, teak, and a patterned tile. The blue and white tile appears three times, at three different sizes. The tile is the thread. As a console front it turns a piece of joinery into a graphic. As a splashback it stops the kitchen reading as a showroom. As three squares on a concrete pier it is almost a signature.

The turned columns and the brick piers are structure and threshold made visible. They mark where one part of the plan ends, without a door or partition. That is how an open plan keeps its openness, and still has rooms.

The puja niche is treated as architecture rather than as furniture. It is cut into the panelled wall, with its own warm light and its own screen. That gives it a place in the plan, instead of a shelf to occupy. The bathroom makes the Indian argument through craft instead. A stone basin carved in relief and a patchwork tile floor carry the pattern. That is what allows the surrounding walls to stay plain.

Why we design this way

Our design language calls this Indian intelligence rather than Indian ornament. A fretwork screen earns its place by filtering the light in a niche. A carved basin is worth making by hand. It is the object in a bathroom you touch every day. We favour regional stone, timber, terrazzo and handmade tile, from makers we can name and visit. We settle the plan before the palette, so the pattern has something to sit on. The argument in full is on our page about contemporary Indian homes.

Every Aalekh interior is drawn, visualised in 3D and reviewed by Ar. Pooja Kothari before fit-out begins. See more of our interiors work, or read how we approach apartment interiors in Bangalore.