Neogenesis and Studi0261 Stack Balconies and Green Veils into a Layered Urban Home in Surat

On a tight urban plot in Surat, Neogenesis and Studi0261 have built a house that treats every floor as a negotiation between enclosure and exposure. Antarvan Residence, completed in 2025, is a 375 square meter vertical home whose facade reads as a stack of horizontal planes, timber screens, and cascading planter beds. From the street it looks less like a singular volume and more like a sectional diagram of domestic life made legible through layered thresholds.

What makes this house worth studying is not any single material gesture but the way it organizes program around a continuous vertical void. The stairwell is not a leftover corridor but a spatial spine, pulling light from a skylit top and distributing it downward through pendant fixtures and open landings. Parking and storage occupy the ground floor, the communal living spaces sit on the first, bedrooms stack above, and a rooftop terrace caps the composition. It is a familiar section for Indian urban housing, but the architects have been unusually deliberate about how each level breathes, both inward toward the stair void and outward through deep balconies.

A Facade That Breathes

The street elevation is the project's most legible idea. Concrete floor slabs project forward as balcony decks, each shaded by timber screens and softened by trailing greenery that cascades from planter troughs between levels. Glass railings keep the composition transparent without sacrificing safety. The effect is a facade that changes with the seasons as plants grow, fill in, and shift color. It is a controlled wildness, one that owes more to careful irrigation detailing than to any romantic idea of nature reclaiming a building.

Recessed openings punch back into the mass where the screens pull away, creating pockets of deep shade that modulate the western Gujarat sun. The alternation between solid concrete bands and permeable timber bays gives the elevation a rhythm that avoids monotony without resorting to decoration.

The Double-Height Living Core

Step past the ground floor's utilitarian program and the house opens up dramatically. A double-height living room anchors the first floor, its concrete ceiling left exposed to express structure while the polished dark floor pulls everything into a warm, grounded register. The staircase enters this volume as a sculptural element, its dark grey treads and timber railing acting as a visual hinge between the vertical circulation spine and the horizontal living plane.

Furnishings are restrained: cane-backed chairs sit alongside grey upholstered seating, and sheer curtains filter daylight into a diffused glow. A textured wall hanging provides the room's one concession to ornament, and it works precisely because the rest of the palette is so disciplined. The room feels generous despite its compact footprint, a quality achieved through ceiling height rather than floor area.

Timber and Light Through the Stairwell

The stairwell is the project's engine. Looking up from below, the multi-level void reveals pendant lights dropping through the shaft like weighted fishing lines, their cables drawn taut against a skylit ceiling. The architects have lined the balustrade with mesh panels framed in timber, a smart detail that maintains visual continuity between floors while keeping the stair light and airy. You can stand on any landing and sense the full vertical extent of the house.

At ground level, the stair sits beside a mid-century credenza topped with a potted plant, a domestic vignette that humanizes what could otherwise read as a purely circulatory zone. The dark grey steps and timber handrails carry consistent material language from bottom to top, unifying the house around its central void.

Interior Courtyard and Screened Boundaries

Antarvan's relationship with greenery extends beyond the facade. Interior courtyard conditions appear at corners where floor-to-ceiling glazing meets potted palms and timber shelving units. These zones blur the line between inside and outside without the luxury of a full open-air courtyard, a pragmatic response to the constrained plot. A timber-framed screen partition adjacent to one glazed wall creates a layered threshold: you pass from solid room through screen to glass to plant to sky. It is a controlled telescoping of depth within a shallow section.

Bedrooms Built Around Warmth

The upper floors shift to a quieter register. Walnut paneling wraps bedroom storage walls and integrates bedside niches lit by circular sconces, creating a warm cocoon that contrasts with the exposed concrete below. Fluted timber nightstands with stone tops echo the fluted base of the dining table on the first floor, a subtle repetition of detail that gives the house material coherence across levels.

A circular sculptural element mounted above one bed and a branch arrangement on a timber shelf bring organic forms into otherwise orthogonal rooms. These are small moves, but they signal a deliberate softening: the house is concrete and glass at its public base but timber and textile in its private quarters.

Material Details: Dining and Bath

The dining area pairs a fluted timber table base with upholstered chairs under a ceiling fan, a combination that is unpretentious and comfortable. The fluting motif carries over to the nightstands upstairs, tying the social and private zones together through millwork language. In the bathroom, terracotta square tiles line the shower enclosure while a marble-look finish covers the vanity wall, a pairing that avoids the all-white sterility of many contemporary bathrooms in favor of something earthier and more textured.

A standing mirror in one bedroom corner catches soft daylight from an adjacent window, bouncing it deeper into the room. These details accumulate: no single one is extraordinary, but together they build a house that feels considered rather than merely styled.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plans reveal the project's organizational logic with clarity. The ground floor is almost entirely given over to parking, storage, and a guest bedroom with its own toilet, treating the street level as a service layer that buffers domestic life from the urban ground. The first floor is where the house truly begins: living room, kitchen, dining area, a parents' room, and a generous balcony all orbiting the central stairwell. The second floor houses two bedrooms, each with its own balcony and access to the stair void. The third level contains a single bedroom and an open terrace, while the roof becomes a planted terrace with circular seating elements.

Read together, the plans describe a gradient: density and utility at the base, openness and leisure at the top. Each floor has slightly less enclosed area and slightly more outdoor space, a vertical unwinding that rewards the climb. The stairwell sits consistently at the center, holding the section together as both a structural and experiential core.

Why This Project Matters

Indian urban housing, particularly in fast-growing cities like Surat, tends to maximize floor area at the expense of environmental quality. Antarvan pushes against that tendency by committing square meters to balconies, voids, and planted surfaces that produce no sellable floor area but dramatically improve the experience of living inside. The architects have understood that in a hot, dense city, shade and airflow are not luxuries but necessities, and they have embedded that understanding into the building's section rather than treating it as a surface-level add-on.

The project also demonstrates that material discipline can do the work that elaborate formal gymnastics cannot. Concrete, timber, mesh, and glass are deployed with enough consistency to create a coherent whole but enough variation to keep each floor distinct. For a 375 square meter house, Antarvan carries a lot of spatial ambition, and most of it lands. It is a compact building that never feels small, and that is the hardest trick in urban residential architecture.

Antarvan Residence by Neogenesis and Studi0261. Located in Surat, India. 375 m². Completed in 2025. Photography by Manan Surti Photography.

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