Projects02
Two Courtyards
A duplex where two light wells were treated as rooms rather than as gaps between them.
- Project
- 02
- Year
- 2024
- Location
- Baner, Pune
- Area
- 3,100 SQ FT
- Type
- Residential
- Duration
- 26 WEEKS
The brief
The clients bought a duplex with two internal light wells the builder had treated as ventilation shafts — tiled, drained, and visible from four rooms. They wanted the interior 'brightened up'. The wells were the brightest thing in the flat and everyone was ignoring them.
The approach
We glazed both wells floor to ceiling and planted them, which turned two shafts into two courtyards and gave every adjacent room a view instead of a wall. The upper well now reads from the stairwell, so the climb between floors has something to look at. This cost less than the reconfiguration the clients originally asked for and did considerably more.
With daylight arriving from the middle of the plan rather than only the edges, we could afford darker surfaces deeper in. The floors are a mid-brown engineered oak and the joinery around the wells is stained close to it, so the frames recede and the planting reads first. Everything within two metres of a well is a material that tolerates humidity — no veneer, no MDF, sealed stone thresholds.
Materials
Engineered oak · Stained ash · Textured plaster · Basalt
Before & after
Drag the divider to compare the original space with the finished room. Both photographs are taken from the same position.
