Malwa Pods: Compact Urban Housing Rooted in Indore's Mill-Town Heritage

What happens when the workers leave and the looms go silent? In Indore's Malwa Mill district, the answer has been unfolding for over a century: families repurposed their homes into small businesses, blurring the line between domestic life and commerce. Malwa Pods takes that legacy as a design brief, proposing a compact residential typology where a ground-floor shop, a central courtyard, jali screens, and split-level living coexist in a single vertical structure tuned to the rhythms of a multi-generational family.

Designed by Chirag Khurana and Samprati Jain, the project was shortlisted in Nano Nest 2020, the uni.xyz competition focused on innovative small-footprint housing. The site sits in the dense fabric of the Malwa Mill neighborhood, an area that rose to prominence under British colonial rule when mills were built to process raw materials locally. As those mills shut down in the twentieth century, residents adapted, turning their homes into live-work units. Malwa Pods channels that adaptive spirit into a contemporary residential design that refuses to choose between heritage and efficiency.

A Central Staircase as Social Spine

The site plan and section drawings reveal the project's structural logic: a central staircase acts as the primary circulation spine, linking split-floor levels that stagger vertically to maximize spatial organization within a narrow footprint. This is not simply a utilitarian move. By placing the stair at the core, the designers ensure that every trip between floors becomes a moment of visual and social connection across levels. The sections show how this arrangement allows a central courtyard to run through the building, pulling daylight deep into interior spaces and enabling stack ventilation, a passive cooling strategy critical in Indore's hot climate.

The split-floor configuration also separates zones of activity without hard partitions, giving each half-level a distinct character. A small shop space at the entrance sustains the mixed-use legacy of the Malwa Mill area, grounding the building in the neighborhood's commercial DNA rather than treating retail as an afterthought tacked onto a residential plan.

Designing for the Gupta Family's Day

One of the project's most compelling moves is its time-based analysis of domestic life. The axonometric diagrams track how four key spaces, the terrace, the kids' room, the family room, and the formal living area, transform throughout the day for a fictional multi-generational household, the Guptas. Morning tea on the terrace, children studying in the afternoon, evening gatherings in the family room: each scenario is mapped with figures occupying the spaces at specific hours. The result is not a static floor plan but a choreography of daily rituals that the architecture actively supports.

This human-centered approach elevates the project beyond mere spatial optimization. It argues that compact housing in dense Indian neighborhoods must respond to cultural practices, not just metric efficiency. Rooms that serve a single purpose are a luxury these sites cannot afford, so the design lets spaces flex, accommodating the changing needs of a family whose social life is deeply communal.

Stacked Living: Four Units Read as One

The exploded axonometric drawing pulls the building apart to show four stacked residential units, each rendered with interior vignettes that hint at material choices and spatial quality. Traditional Maratha-inspired elements, wooden windows, jali screens, courtyard openings, sit alongside modern concrete finishes, producing what the designers describe as a balance between industrial rawness and traditional softness. The exploded view makes legible how each level negotiates its relationship with the courtyard void, capturing light and air at different angles depending on floor height.

The layering is deliberate: the building reads as a single cohesive volume from the street, reinforcing the tight urban grain of the Malwa Mill neighborhood, while internally each unit maintains its own identity. It is a compact interpretation of the Indian joint-family house, where proximity does not mean uniformity.

Timber, Lattice, and Sky on the Rooftop

The rooftop terrace rendering is the project's most atmospheric image. Exposed timber beams span overhead, lattice screens filter harsh sunlight into dappled patterns, and hanging planters introduce greenery into what would otherwise be a purely structural frame. The terrace functions as a communal living room open to the sky, a space coded into the daily routine of the Gupta family for morning and evening use. In a dense neighborhood where ground-level open space is scarce, claiming the roof as usable domestic territory is both pragmatic and culturally resonant.

The material palette here, timber against concrete, jali against open sky, encapsulates the project's broader thesis. Indore's identity sits at the intersection of trade history and contemporary urban ambition. Malwa Pods does not disguise this tension. It builds with it.

Why This Project Matters

Malwa Pods tackles a problem that will only intensify across Indian cities: how to house growing, multi-generational families in shrinking urban plots without erasing the cultural specificity of a place. The designers' decision to anchor the project in the real history of the Malwa Mill district gives it a narrative depth that generic compact-housing proposals lack. The shop at the entrance, the courtyard at the core, the time-mapped interiors: each gesture ties the architecture to a lived reality rather than an abstract brief.

For students and young professionals working on housing in historic Indian neighborhoods, the project offers a useful model. Heritage does not have to mean preservation in amber. It can mean understanding why a community adapted its homes into workshops, why courtyards persist in hot climates, and why a staircase can be more than circulation. Khurana and Jain demonstrate that small-footprint housing, done with care, can carry the weight of a place's entire history.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Chirag Khurana, Samprati Jain

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Project credits: Malwa Pods by Chirag Khurana, Samprati Jain Nano Nest 2020 (uni.xyz).