N. B. Architects Nestles a Farmhouse into a Chikoo Grove on India's Konkan Coast

Bordi sits at the northern tip of Maharashtra's Konkan coast, a stretch of land where chikoo orchards run almost to the waterline and the Arabian Sea is more felt than seen. N. B. Architects, led by Neha Joshi, chose to treat that canopy not as an obstacle to clear but as the dominant spatial fact of the site. Parnasambhar, a 5,000-square-foot farmhouse completed in 2025, threads itself between mature trees, using their shade, their dappled light, and their root zones as design inputs rather than afterthoughts.

What makes the house worth studying is its willingness to let the landscape dictate almost every formal move. The plan angles its wings to dodge tree trunks. The section cuts into sloped terrain to create split levels. And the white stucco envelope is perforated by seemingly random square openings that turn out to be precisely aimed at specific branches, light conditions, and sightlines. The result is a building that reads as solid and anchored from the road but dissolves into its orchard context once you step inside.

Arriving Through the Canopy

The approach is deliberately slow. A gravel drive curves past a low stucco wall that hides the house's full volume, revealing it in fragments. From the street, the building reads as a restrained white mass sitting beneath overhanging palms and mango branches, its entrance recessed behind shallow steps and a timber door. The architects clearly wanted the trees to do most of the talking on arrival. A figure standing beside a cow in the driveway in one photograph tells you everything about the pace of life here: rural, unhurried, governed by seasons and shade rather than schedules.

The front elevation avoids the coastal holiday-house cliché of expansive glass and dramatic overhangs. Instead, the cantilevered terraces with metal railings are set back, almost shy, allowing mature tree branches to filter light before it ever touches the facade. Privacy comes not from walls but from the thick green cover the site already provided.

The Entry Hall as Light Instrument

Step inside and the double-height entry hall announces the house's central material strategy: herringbone stone flooring, white plaster walls, and those scattered square windows operating as controlled light ports. In the afternoon, they cast sharp rectangles of sun across the floor, turning the foyer into a kind of sundial. A floating staircase with vertical metal balustrades rises through the space, anchored by a suspended brass lamp that hangs like a plumb bob marking the center of the house.

The entry portico keeps things modest, with a timber door and shallow steps that make no attempt at grandeur. This restraint carries through the interior, where the architects resist the temptation to over-detail. The green accent wall behind the staircase is one of the few moments of color, and it works precisely because it is isolated.

Living Under the Double-Height Void

The central living room is the spatial heart of Parnasambhar. A double-height ceiling opens to a skylight that casts geometric shadows across the herringbone stone floor, creating a pattern that shifts with the sun's angle. The room is tall enough to breathe but not so tall that it feels cavernous. The proportions land in the zone where vertical space amplifies the sense of calm rather than generating emptiness.

An open staircase with timber handrails ascends across the green accent wall, connecting the living level to the bedrooms above. The diagonal shadows in the sitting area, falling across a potted palm, reinforce the idea that the house is designed to be read through its light, not its furniture. The architects seem to have treated sunlight as the most important material in the palette, placing everything else in its service.

The Stairwell as Vertical Garden

The stairwell deserves its own mention because it functions as more than circulation. Polished stone treads and vertical railings create a rhythm as you climb, while scattered square windows at different heights frame greenery outside in a way that feels curated without being fussy. Each landing offers a different view of the surrounding trees, so the act of moving between floors becomes an act of looking outward.

Upstairs, the bedrooms open through sliding glass doors to balconies where the canopy is close enough to touch. One photograph captures a figure sitting on a balcony in full sunlight, the chikoo branches a few feet away. This proximity to the trees is the whole point of the project, and the stairwell orchestrates the transition from the cooler, shadowed ground floor to the brighter, canopy-level rooms above.

Courtyard and Pool as Social Core

The rear courtyard organizes the house's social life around a rectangular pool tucked beneath tree shade. The white stucco facade facing the courtyard is punched with the same scattered square windows and barred openings that characterize the front, creating a coherent language on all sides. A cantilevered terrace with horizontal railings extends over the pool, giving the upper-floor rooms a direct visual connection to the water and the garden beyond.

From above, the pool reads as a mirror for the tree canopy, its surface catching shadows cast by branches overhead. This is a deliberate inversion of the typical vacation-house pool, which usually sits in full sun as a performance of leisure. Here the pool is shaded, private, embedded in the landscape rather than displayed against it.

Covered Terraces and the Garden Courtyard

The covered terraces anchor the house to its garden in practical terms. Cylindrical columns support cantilevered canopies, creating shaded outdoor rooms where the boundary between inside and outside collapses. One terrace faces dense banana plants in bright sunlight, while another opens to the pool edge with a raised platform for sitting in the morning sun. These are the spaces where the house will actually be lived in most of the day, given the coastal climate.

The garden courtyard with its old tree canopy and leaf-scattered gravel surface has the quality of a space that was found rather than designed. Two figures seated beneath a mature tree in one photograph suggest the courtyard functions as an outdoor room defined entirely by the canopy above, with the white building facade as a quiet backdrop. At dusk, the rear facade reveals timber pivot doors and metal window grilles that give the house a more domestic, intimate register than its daytime reading suggests.

Plans and Drawings

The site layout and site plan reveal the full extent of the strategy: the building footprint is positioned to preserve the maximum number of existing trees, with its angled wings dodging trunks and root zones. The driveway wraps around the irregular plot to approach the entrance obliquely. The ground floor plan shows rooms organized around courtyards, with the pool edge defining the transition between built and planted zones. Labeled spaces confirm a program distributed to maximize cross-ventilation and tree-filtered light.

The first floor plan reveals the central double-height living room as a void around which bedrooms are arranged, with angular terrace extensions reaching toward the canopy. The terrace floor plan shows a mix of covered and open-to-sky zones organized around the central staircase volume. Most instructive is the schematic section, which illustrates how the house uses split levels to negotiate sloped terrain, stepping down into the ground while the surrounding trees rise above. The section confirms that the house is deliberately low, never competing with the canopy for height.

Why This Project Matters

Parnasambhar is a corrective to the common approach of clearing a site and then adding landscaping back in as decoration. By accepting the existing chikoo grove as a fixed condition, the architects were forced into a series of moves, angled wings, split levels, scattered windows, that give the house a specificity it could never have achieved on a blank canvas. The building is shaped by its trees in the same way a river-edge house is shaped by flood levels: not as a gesture of environmental sensitivity but as a structural fact.

The house also demonstrates that privacy in a rural setting does not require walls or fences. The thick green cover does the work, and the architecture simply calibrates openings to balance views, light, and seclusion. For anyone designing in dense orchard landscapes, whether in India or elsewhere, this project offers a clear argument: map the canopy first, and let the plan follow.

Parnasambhar by N. B. Architects, Bordi, Maharashtra, India. 5,000 sq ft. Completed 2025. Lead architect: Neha Joshi. Photography by pranitborastudio.

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