Architects Collaborative Stacks a Seven-Level House onto an Irregular 270 m² Plot in New Delhi

Most Delhi plots arrive as tidy rectangles, and most Delhi houses respond with a predictable stack: parking on stilts, floors above, a terrace on top. The House of Thirds by Architects Collaborative, led by principals Abhishek Saxena and Madhav Maini, starts from a less forgiving condition. The 270 m² site is a skewed, five-sided polygon sitting where several neighbouring plots converge. It slots into its manicured neighbourhood like the last piece of a jigsaw. The odd shape is the starting brief, not a constraint the house works around.

What interests us is where the house puts its ambition. Instead of chasing width it cannot have, the house grows in both directions. It has two basement levels, a stilt floor, two individual floors and a duplex at the top, seven levels in all. The real design work happens in the gaps: courts sunk deep into the ground, slit windows cut into plaster, and a steel-framed skin of operable timber shutters. Read together, these make a dense urban house that spends its square metres on light and air as much as on rooms.

The Last Piece of the Jigsaw

From the street, the building's narrow corner faces you with stacked planted balconies and glass balustrades. The aerial view explains the geometry better than any elevation can. Pale concrete planes turn with the plot's angles, and climbing vines and a planted entry soften the base. The house does not try to square itself off. It accepts the irregular footprint and lets the facades fold with it.

At street level the entry steps sit against a slit-windowed wall, with timber louvres and creepers above. The approach is quiet and almost withdrawn, which suits a single-family home that holds a lot of program on a small lot. The privacy comes from the depth of the facade rather than from a blank wall.

A Timber Skin on a Steel Grid

The most legible move on the exterior is a dark steel grid filled with hinged timber shutters. When the panels are open, the facade becomes porous and angled, a field of planes catching sky and light. When they are closed, it reads as a flat, weathered timber wall. Red flowering vines cross the frame and the timber is left to age. The architects clearly expect this skin to change with use and with the seasons.

This is a sensible device for Delhi. A shutter that occupants can adjust gives them control over glare, privacy and airflow without fixing a single answer into the building. It also gives a tall, narrow volume a human-scaled texture. You read the house panel by panel rather than as one sheer mass.

Slits Instead of Openings

Where the timber grid stops, the white plaster walls take over, punctured by tall vertical slots. These are not windows in the usual sense of framed views. They work as light instruments. Inside, they throw bright lines across a plaster wall, a polished floor and a stone counter, so the time of day becomes visible in the room.

The slits also protect the interior on a plot hemmed in by neighbours. You get daylight and a sliver of sky without exposing the rooms to the street. Pairing narrow cuts with the operable timber screen gives the house two distinct facade languages, one fixed and one adjustable. The pairing feels deliberate rather than decorative.

Living Around the Court

The social floor is arranged around a court rather than along a corridor. The open kitchen and dining area sits on the west side, tied together by a single veined stone island. A court separates it from the living room, so cooking, eating and sitting all share one continuous field of view through glass. A swing daybed hangs on chains over a terracotta tile inlay, which works as a fixed rug. It is a playful element, and it marks a zone without adding a wall.

The court itself is treated as a room. A stepped brick floor leads to the glazing, and beyond it a fiddle-leaf fig stands over a shallow broken-tile mosaic pool with a small fountain jet. On a plot this tight, giving up floor area to an open court is a real decision. Here it pays off: light, greenery and the sound of water reach the centre of the plan.

Digging Down: The Basement Duplex

The basement is where the house is most inventive. It is planned as a duplex, with two courts sunk into it as deep light-wells. The lower level is double-height and used mainly for lounging. A peripheral mezzanine wraps three sides and holds storage and a guest bed. A glass-balustraded bridge looks down onto sofas and low tables, and a double-height glass wall opens onto a sunlit stepped court. In most houses a basement is where daylight fails, but here it reaches the lowest floor.

Looking up through the multi-storey lightwell shows how the whole section depends on these voids. Steel framing, timber louvres and wire mesh screens line the shaft, which carries light and ventilation down through the building. On a small urban lot, this is the most effective way to make below-grade space habitable rather than merely usable.

Stairs, Corridors and Thresholds

Seven levels mean a lot of circulation, and a lift serves them. The architects still treat the stair as a pleasure rather than a service. It has floating timber treads, slim brass handrails and a ledge of potted plants beside it. The corridors carry their own character. Terrazzo floors are striped or dashed in white, a red joinery block anchors one passage, and arched doorways lead toward plants and daylight.

Thresholds between inside and court are handled with care. Seen past a glass balustrade with a timber handrail, the courtyard elevation shows the shutter grid behind potted palms, so the facade language reappears inside. A small sitting nook behind open timber doors has a leather armchair, framed collages and a coffered wood ceiling. It shows the house also makes room for enclosed, more intimate corners.

Private Rooms with Material Wit

The bedrooms and bathrooms trade the drama of the voids for more personal moves. One bedroom has a curved raised platform with a floor mattress beneath a round black panel. One bathroom pairs dotted concrete walls and an oval black-framed mirror with a floating stone vanity and dashed terrazzo. Another commits to yellow, in the basin and the drawers. Tall slit windows recur throughout, so even the most private rooms keep the house's signature light.

Plans and Drawings

The plans make the site's geometry explicit. The angular, wedge-shaped footprint stays the same from basement to top floor, and each level organises itself around internal courts and lightwells rather than a central core. The upper floor holds three bedroom suites with dressing areas and bathrooms. Section A-A shows the full stack, from the double-height basement through the stilt level to the third floor.

Why This Project Matters

Delhi's plotted neighbourhoods are filling up with stilt-plus-four houses that maximise floor area and often give up daylight to do it. The House of Thirds works inside the same envelope logic but spends its effort differently. It cuts courts through the section and turns the basement into a double-height lounge. It also gives residents an operable facade, so they can tune the house themselves. Optimising space here means more than counting square metres; it means making each of them liveable.

It is also a reminder that awkward sites can produce better buildings than easy ones. The skewed, five-sided plot forced the architects to think in section and to treat voids as primary rooms. The result reads as specific to its corner of the city. For anyone designing on a tight urban lot, the lesson is to dig for light, cut the walls carefully, and let the skin move.

The House of Thirds by Architects Collaborative (principal architects Abhishek Saxena and Madhav Maini; design team Ahana Chakrabarty and Bhupesh Arora), New Delhi, India. Area: 1100 m². Completed: 2025. Photography by Vibhor Yadav.

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