Alluding to the architectures of Le Cobusier’s Villa Savoye and van der Rohe’s Farnsworth house, the programme for this household of three is fairly straightforward: all private functions (bedrooms, toilet & baths) are relegated to the longitudinal North side of the volume on two levels while all public functions (living, dining, food preparation) occupy the other half of the space as one big interior volume (open-plan, double height).

But as they say, nothing ever is as it seems.

In what started as an attempt to get away from the city, here is a place that houses contradictions: centre/periphery, cold/warmth, and the Modern/more or less everything it’s not.

The first contradiction lies in the concept of reviving the Modern agenda: in this age of the climate emergency, is such a revival appropriate especially when indigenous design appears to be the way to move forward as that fount of sustainable practices of ‘design’?

Flowing from this, the second paradox revolves around the idea of the uncordial. With nary a superfluous element, this is an exercise in restraint that borders the impersonal—that antithesis of ‘home’ (the locally sourced marble used for the flooring throughout from the toilet and baths to the carport, certainly does not help in making a case for cozy). So how is this ever-volatile notion of home made to rest in a site that doesn’t allow for the accoutrements, comforts of the everyday?

With the last antimony—that locates that most urban of aesthetics in suburbia—what is ultimately revealed is a space that is built to accommodate these incongruities.

In this double-sided, symmetrical cantilever, these weighty dichotomies are made to appeal to lightness. Cavern-like in its framing of the outside world—rendering both exterior and interior matter-of-factly—what is created is a site of erasure that allows for exactly an introspective thinking about design, of materiality and gives sharp focus on life itself as source of intimacies.

Or at least that is the hope.