MODO Designs Recasts the Ahmedabad Haveli in Board-Marked Concrete for a Family Devoted to Music and Art

The haveli comes up often in contemporary Indian residential design. Too often it appears as a jharokha motif or a carved door, borrowed for nostalgia and attached to a house that otherwise ignores it. The Melody House, a 9,000 sq ft residence on the outskirts of Ahmedabad by MODO Designs under Ar. Arpan Shah, works with the typology at a deeper level. It keeps what made the old courtyard houses of the walled city livable: an inward-turning plan, layered thresholds and a sky-lit void at the centre. It drops the ornament almost entirely.

The clients are a Gujarati family whose daily lives revolve around art and music, and that brief shows in the house. Rooms read less like a sequence of programmatic boxes and more like a set of listening and looking spaces arranged around two courtyards. The material palette is tight: board-marked concrete, terracotta-toned plaster, teak and a few black steel columns. That restraint lets you read the house's real ambition, which is to hold a peri-urban family's routines inside a calm, shaded interior world.

A Garden Elevation Built from Overhangs

From the lawn, the house presents itself as a stack of terracotta-toned slabs cantilevering over a fully glazed ground floor. The upper level reads as a heavy lid, and the lower level almost disappears behind reflections of trees. In Ahmedabad's climate, that order makes sense: the deep projections shade the glass during the harshest hours, and the warm colour softens what could otherwise be a blunt concrete profile.

The central gap in the elevation does a lot of work. It breaks the long facade into two wings, signals the courtyard behind and gives the bougainvillea on the roof somewhere to spill over. The covered terraces beneath the overhangs, furnished with wicker chairs, are the real verandahs of the house. We would argue they matter more than any of the formal living rooms.

Arrival as a Sequence, Not a Door

The street side is far more guarded. Board-marked concrete sits above a terracotta plastered base, timber slat screens filter views from the drive, and a slim canopy marks the entry without making a show of it. This is the haveli's public face, interpreted literally: closed and textured outside, with the generosity held back for later.

Once you are past the threshold, a passage edged with pebble-lined palm beds leads to a glass pivot door under a timber ceiling, and the courtyard is already visible beyond it. The compression and release here is old-fashioned spatial choreography, and it is handled well. You arrive into the light rather than in front of a facade.

Two Courtyards Doing the Haveli's Work

The courtyards are where the haveli reference becomes architecture rather than branding. Board-marked concrete walls rise around stone paving, a timber bench and planted beds of palms and frangipani. Trailing plants fall from upper ledges, so the vertical surfaces become gardens as well. Seen from above, the void reads as a deep, shaded well, closer in proportion to a traditional chowk than to the open-to-sky lightwell found in most speculative villas.

What we like is how little the courtyards are dressed. A single bench, a planter and shadows moving across the floor are enough to make them usable at several times of day. The timber-lined soffits of the surrounding walkways warm the concrete and keep the edges from feeling institutional.

Steel, Teak and the Language of Thresholds

Black steel columns stand slightly forward of the courtyard edge and read as fine vertical lines against the foliage. The open-tread timber staircase on its dark steel stringer continues that logic: light structure set against heavy walls, so that the concrete stays the dominant mass.

The corridor with a raised agave planter on one side and a built-in teak window seat on the other is a small but telling detail. Circulation here is also a place to sit. That is a haveli habit too, where the edges of the courtyard were always occupied rather than simply passed through.

Living Rooms That Face the Garden

If the courtyards turn the house inward, the living spaces turn it back out. Floor-to-ceiling sliding glass opens the ground floor fully to the lawn, and polished concrete floors carry the daylight deep into the plan. Reema Pathak Designs keeps the furnishing low and loose, with grey sofas, walnut coffee tables and pink and green armchairs, so the view stays the main event.

Where the glass meets the drive side, a vertical timber slat screen replaces the open garden view with filtered green light. The reading corner, a single armchair beside the glass with dappled sun on the floor, may be the most honest image of who this house was built for.

Rooms Shaped Around Art

The family's attachment to art is clearest in the dining room. An oval timber table sits beneath pendant lamps and faces a carved wooden relief of buildings, an urban landscape in timber that nods to the dense old city the house reinterprets. Glazing toward the courtyard garden keeps the room from turning into a gallery.

Elsewhere, relief wall panels, a sculptural pendant and a framed abstract canvas above a walnut sideboard are placed with care rather than in quantity. The board-marked concrete gives these pieces a neutral but textured ground, and that is a far better backdrop than painted drywall.

Upper Floor Retreats and Planted Terraces

Upstairs, the board-formed concrete moves into the bedrooms, where it serves as the backdrop to a timber platform bed and a padded headboard. That keeps the private rooms consistent with the rest of the house instead of switching into a softer, generic hotel aesthetic. Sliding doors open onto balconies with woven chairs and bougainvillea.

The roof terraces carry the cantilever theme to its end. Thin concrete slabs project over planted parapets, a rattan daybed and green ottomans furnish an outdoor room, and Rohaan Teli's landscape takes over the edges. Here the house finally behaves like a pavilion in the trees.

Plans and Drawings

The first floor plan confirms what the photographs suggest: bedrooms, terraces and passages arranged around two central courtyards, with the driveway and a planter running along the top edge. Read next to the aerial view of the courtyard, the plan shows a disciplined double-court organisation. It is the clearest evidence that the haveli reference shapes the structure of the house and is not just a mood.

Why This Project Matters

Ahmedabad's peripheries are filling up with large private homes, and most of them settle on one of two defaults: a glass box that overheats or a pastiche of regional ornament. The Melody House points to a third option. It takes the haveli as a spatial model of courtyards, thresholds and shade, then builds it with concrete, teak and plaster in a way that looks plainly contemporary.

It is not a radical house, and it does not try to be one. Its value lies in consistency: a restrained palette, a plan that puts the void at the centre and furnishings that support daily life instead of competing with it. For practices working on high-end residences in Indian cities, that is a more useful precedent than another sculptural statement.

The Melody House by MODO Designs (lead architect Ar. Arpan Shah), Ahmedabad, India. Area: 9,000 sq ft. Completed: 2026. Associate architect: Anupam Chaudhary. Interior design: Reema Pathak Designs. Landscape: Rohaan Teli. Structure: Amee Associates. Contractor: Bhumir Shah CPMC. Photography: PHX India.

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