Ishtika Peels Open a Kerala Hillside Home Around Its Two-Storey Courtyard Core

The Malayalam word akam translates loosely to core, inside, mind, soul. For Ishtika, led by architects Jinoj M and Jyothisree, that word became the organizing principle of a 2,300-square-foot house in Enikkara, on the windward side of a small hill at the urban edge of Thiruvananthapuram. Akam House was designed for a young couple and their two daughters, a family whose daily life was fractured across two jobs, two schools, and two separate residences. The brief was, at its root, about convergence: build one home that prioritizes togetherness.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is how literally the architects read that brief into the plan. Akam House is T-shaped, with shared family spaces running along a central spine and private zones, bedrooms, kitchen, branching off the arms. You approach through layers of semi-open threshold spaces that peel away as you move inward, from a traditional poomukham at the entrance through an outdoor court with a pond to a double-height internal courtyard at the building's heart. The progression is slow, deliberate, and oriented toward a core that is open sky rather than enclosed room. The family gathers around air and light, not walls.

Approaching Through Layers

From the narrow 3.3-meter-wide access street, Akam House presents itself as a stack of gabled volumes rendered in white plaster above a weathered stone base, with red brick masses stepping up behind. Flowering roses and young plantings soften the boundary, but the real trick is the layering: a white garage wall with gridded paving gives way to the entrance path, which is screened and compressed before the house opens up. The architects use this sequence to slow your pace and shift your attention from the street to the interior world beyond.

Private yards are screened from public view by the white rendered walls, a simple move that separates the family's outdoor life from the neighborhood without resorting to fortress-like enclosure. The clay tile roofs, visible from the street, tie the project to Kerala's domestic vernacular and signal that the house is not trying to announce itself. It sits within its context rather than competing with it.

The Poomukham and Entry Pavilion

The poomukham, a traditional Kerala sit-out, is positioned at the entrance and doubles as a space for the family's daughters to dance, practice yoga, or simply play. It is framed by exposed timber roof trusses, brick piers, and a concrete beam that directs the eye toward the courtyard beyond. The architects reused old wood for elements like this entry pavilion's structure, giving the new house a material patina that a fresh build rarely possesses.

A covered walkway with timber columns and stepping-stone paths runs alongside planted beds screened by bamboo. This intermediate zone is neither fully inside nor fully outside, and it is precisely this ambiguity that gives Akam House its character. The house does not have a single front door moment; it has a gradient of enclosure, each step further in bringing a little more shelter and a little more privacy.

The Courtyard as Gravitational Center

The two-storey internal courtyard is the soul of the house, literally and programmatically. Bamboo is planted in a gravel bed at its base, rising toward latticed brick screens and exposed concrete beams that frame the sky above. Natural light filters down through a glazed skylight, casting shifting patterns across the brick and concrete surfaces throughout the day. The courtyard pulls air through the house via stack effect, a passive strategy that is critical in Kerala's humid tropical climate.

The photograph of the architects' two young clients seated among the courtyard greenery captures exactly what the space is for. It is not ornamental. It is the room where the family converges, visible from the living area, the dining space, and the upper-floor bedrooms. Every arm of the T-plan either opens onto or overlooks this central void. The common spaces are deliberately oversized relative to the private ones, a proportion that quietly reinforces the design thesis: family time first.

Brick, Concrete, and the Double Wall

On the western elevation, where afternoon heat gain is most punishing, Ishtika deployed a double-wall system: a thin skin of exposed concrete on the outside, a brick wall on the inside, and an air gap between the two that ventilates through a roof-level opening. It is a low-tech thermal buffer that avoids direct openings on the west entirely, eliminating glare and radiant heat without relying on mechanical cooling. The projecting brick coursing visible in close-up creates a textured surface that doubles as a sculptural element and a means of breaking up direct sunlight.

Elsewhere, the material palette stays disciplined: exposed brick, raw concrete ceilings, painted stone, and reused timber. A corridor lined with brick on one side and a blue-painted timber screen on the other shows how the architects use color sparingly and strategically, marking transitions between zones without doors. The timber-framed gabled roof with its exposed rafters is both structure and finish. Nothing is concealed that does not need to be.

Living Spaces That Open Both Ways

The ground-floor living area sits along the central spine with the internal courtyard on one side and a verandah overlooking the valley to the east on the other. The room is therefore cross-ventilated by design and cross-lit by views in two directions. Exposed brick walls, a concrete ceiling, and timber louvered doors give the space a tonal warmth that photographs well but, more importantly, ages well in Kerala's climate. Three brass globe pendants hang below a concrete vault ceiling in the upper living room, their golden light a counterpoint to the grey concrete above.

The kitchen features an exposed brick island, timber-slatted upper cabinets, and brass pendant lights, all under a raw concrete ceiling. It occupies one arm of the T-plan and extends from a smaller kitchenette along the hallway, a layout that separates the daily cooking zone from the social one without severing the connection between them. Jalis, louvered windows, and air shafts ensure that cooking odors and moisture are pulled out passively.

Terraces and Upper Rooms

The first floor places two bedrooms on either arm of the T, connected by a central living room. Above that, an open terrace with a covered seating space, a utility shed, and a spiral staircase to the roof level (where a water tank and solar fittings sit) extends the family's usable outdoor space vertically. Blue louvered shutters, bamboo overhead trellises, and concrete-framed glazing give the terraces a domestic warmth that is sometimes absent in exposed-concrete houses.

A split-level terrace with concrete steps and folding chairs against a brick wall demonstrates the architects' interest in providing multiple scales of outdoor gathering: from the large poomukham at ground level to these small, intimate perches above the treeline. Beneath the semi-open living area at ground level, a 3,500-liter rainwater harvesting tank is buried, quietly handling the heavy Kerala monsoons.

Staircase, Bedrooms, and Intimate Details

The interior staircase alternates wood and concrete treads, a detail that is both decorative and functional, providing tactile variety underfoot and reducing the visual weight of what could otherwise be a heavy concrete run. At its top, a horizontal-louver door frames green foliage beyond, reinforcing the house's habit of placing nature at the end of every sightline.

In the bedrooms, built-in desks, white storage walls, and window seats overlook green foliage through latticed timber shutters. These rooms are deliberately modest in size, the inverse of the generous common spaces below. A covered terrace glimpsed through a doorway, with clay tile flooring and a bamboo screen catching afternoon light, extends the private quarters outward without exposing them. Privacy here is not a closed door; it is a filtered threshold.

Plans and Drawings

The ground floor plan reveals the T-shaped logic clearly: the double carport and landscaped courtyard at the front, the open living and dining areas along the spine, and the kitchen and guest bedroom extending on either arm. On the first floor, bedroom suites connect to terraces and look down through the sloped tiled roofs below. The terrace-level plan shows a pool, planted areas, and varied paving textures that indicate the architects treated the roof as a fully programmed landscape rather than leftover space. Together, the three drawings confirm that every square foot of this compact 9.45-cent plot has been accounted for.

Why This Project Matters

Akam House matters because it demonstrates that passive climate design in tropical India does not require a didactic or austere aesthetic. The double wall, the jalis, the air shafts, the rainwater tank: all of these elements are present but none of them dominate. They are woven into a house that feels warm, tactile, and domestic. The use of reused wood and recycled roof tiles grounds the project in a material economy that is both ecologically responsible and culturally resonant with Kerala's building traditions.

More than that, the project takes a simple programmatic insight, that a family scattered across the city needs shared space more than it needs square footage, and turns it into a spatial strategy. The T-plan with its oversized common zones and modest bedrooms, the courtyard visible from every room, the layered thresholds that slow the transition from public to private: these are not formal experiments. They are direct responses to how a specific family lives. That specificity, rather than any single material or detail, is what makes the house convincing.

Akam House by Ishtika (Jinoj M, Jyothisree). Location: Enikkara, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. Area: 2,300 sq ft. Year: 2021. Photography by Prahlad Gopakumar.

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