Bangalore Houzz: Natural Materials & Eco-Design Cut Back Carbon

The entrance opens into a large space that is designed in an open layout, with lots of natural light flooding in through the stairwell next to the front door, creating a bright, welcoming ambience.

The living room is cocooned in a layer of exposed terracotta blocks, broken into sections by bands of white, both on the walls and ceiling, imparting a warm rustic air to the space. The wooden partition with blue strips hides the open kitchen from full view. The dashes of white and blue break up the expanse of brick, balancing and lightening the visual weight of the terracotta.

Living room sofas: Fabindia

The kitchen is the centre of action and the hub of the home. It is sleek and utilitarian, and has a vantage view of the house. Granite countertops are highlighted by pale yellow seamless drawers. The green-tinted backsplash gives the muted space a touch of dynamic colour.

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The home has a neatly tucked-in dining room that does not feel constrained, thanks to the height of the ceiling and the daylight that pours in from above. Neat, unfussy design keeps the dining furniture unobtrusively functional. A simple leaf-textured concrete lamp lights up the space at night.

Dining table and chairs: Fabindia

Seethur explains, “The stairwell is such that it moves eloquently through the house, designed to ensure that natural light propagates through all floors of the home, making it a sight worth seeing.”

The crowning beauty, however, is the ovular skylight at 40 feet that floods the entire home with natural light. The house gets its name, ‘Ambara’, which means sky in Kannada, from the patch of blue that connects to the heart of house at all times.

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In the master bedroom, the trademark exposed brick motif continues. Polished wooden floors match the walls in tone, imbuing the room with warm colour. Here, too, creamy white is used to balance the visual weight of reddish brick.

“The roof, composed of a half-vaulted curved terracotta filler-slab, is a minor architectural marvel in its defiance of gravity,” Seethur says.

A bay-window in a corner of the room is the perfect spot to watch the birds on the honge (Indian beech) tree just outside and to look out at the park beyond.