Robust Architecture Workshop Crowns a Worn-Out Kandy House with a Red Gabled Roof Instead of Demolishing It

Most houses in dense suburban Sri Lanka end the same way: the old bungalow gets flattened, the plot gets maxed out, and a new concrete box takes its place. Robust Architecture Workshop, led by Dr. Milinda Pathiraja and Ganga Rathnayake, chose the slower path with Primrose House in Kandy. The site held a deteriorating two-bedroom dwelling. Instead of clearing it, the studio kept the existing construction and grew a 196 m² family home out of and over it, completed in 2023.

The architects frame the decision as both ecological and social, and that framing matters more than it first appears. Reuse here is not a heritage gesture; the original house was unremarkable. What interests us is how the project treats an ordinary, underperforming building as raw material, then adds a steep red-lined roof, a new column structure, perforated block screens and a sequence of ponds and terraces until the old house becomes almost unreadable without the comparison drawings. The result is a house full of light and colour that still carries the bones of what came before.

A Street Face Built from Screens and Colour

From the road, Primrose House presents a stack of layers rather than a single facade: stone walls at the base, a perforated concrete screen, and above it all a steep gable whose underside is painted red. The pink entry door is the first sign that this is not a polite suburban renovation. It reads as a deliberate refusal of the beige neutrality that usually comes with "contemporary tropical" houses.

The crimson steel door, with its exposed rivets and bent wire handle, tells you a lot about the studio's attitude to detailing. Nothing is hidden or over-refined. Hardware looks made rather than specified, and the cantilevered timber deck above the entry turns the threshold into a shaded pocket where the screen, the door and the planting meet.

Climbing the Slope

Kandy is a city of hills, and the house uses its sloping plot as a spatial engine. A stone retaining wall and a floating concrete stair run beside a white-rendered wall, so the act of arriving becomes a climb past textures: rough stone, smooth render, flowering bougainvillea.

Inside, the climb continues. Board-formed concrete niches step along the stair wall, each one framing a slice of treetop through black steel glazing. In the entry hall, a yellow perforated steel stair rises above a green floor next to a board-marked concrete block. The palette is loud, but it is organised: colour marks the new interventions, while concrete and masonry hold the older, heavier ground.

Water and Planting as Architecture

The most convincing argument for keeping the old house may be what happens around it. With landscape architect Mudhitha Chaaminda, the team set the stepped facade above a lily pond framed by frangipani and bougainvillea. White walls, timber balconies and perforated block screens drop toward the water in terraces, so the building feels less like an object on a plot and more like a series of ledges in a garden.

The top-down view of the pond, with stepping stones and floating petals, shows how carefully the ground plane is composed. Water here does real work: it cools the edges, reflects light back into the lower rooms and gives a tight suburban site a sense of depth that a lawn never could.

Under the New Gable

The new roof is the project's defining move. Inside, the gabled double-height space opens up with steel-framed glazing and a timber bridge, and a large tree fills the whole end wall. This is where the stated goal of a light-filled home becomes literal: the old house was presumably low and dim, and the added volume lifts the ceiling into the trees.

The upper room extends the idea outward, with glass doors opening onto a deck and views across to the distant hills. At dusk, the orange-lined timber roof glows above the perforated block wall like a lantern caught in the canopy. It is a strong silhouette, and it gives the renovated house an identity the original never had.

Shadowed Rooms Below

Not every space chases brightness. A dim ground-floor room with carved wooden benches, brick walls and a green floor is backlit by slatted glazing at the far end. We read it as an honest counterpoint to the bright gable above: a cool, sheltered room that probably sits closest to the fabric of the original house.

The covered terrace links the two moods. A built-in concrete bench, perforated block walls and exposed timber beams frame treetops in filtered daylight. Breeze blocks have a long history in Sri Lankan modernism, and here they come back as a working tool for privacy, shade and ventilation rather than a nostalgic ornament.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan places the house among scattered neighbours, tree canopies and winding roads, which confirms how tight the context is. At road level, a single studio room, a stair and a paved forecourt sit behind the boundary wall. The ground floor holds a lounge, formal living room, verandah and a bedroom, with terraced steps and planting falling away to the west.

The upper floor carries most of the family program: an upper lounge, outdoor deck, pantry, three bedrooms and a kitchen and dining volume with angled walls. Putting the kitchen up here, next to the deck and the views, is a smart inversion of the usual Sri Lankan plan. Section A shows how the stepped interior levels follow the slope up to the glazed gable.

Section B reveals two pitched volumes divided by a tall masonry shaft that reads almost like a chimney. The comparison sketches are the most useful drawings in the set: they put the old and new house side by side and make clear that the red roof and the new column structure were laid over the existing body rather than replacing it.

Why This Project Matters

Primrose House makes a case that many architects talk about but few clients commission: the ordinary existing house is worth keeping. It was not a listed building or a modernist icon, just a worn two-bedroom dwelling on a suburban plot. By treating it as a base to build on, Robust Architecture Workshop keeps embodied carbon in place and avoids the waste of demolition, and shows that reuse can produce a house with far more character than a clean-slate replacement.

It also suggests that adaptive reuse does not have to mean restraint. The pink doors, yellow stair, red roof lining and green floors are confident, even playful, and they sit easily alongside brick, stone and breeze block. For a region where suburban housing stock is ageing fast, the project offers a model you could actually repeat: keep the bones, open the roof to the trees, give the ground back to water and planting, and let the new layer be bold.

Primrose House by Robust Architecture Workshop (lead architects Dr. Milinda Pathiraja and Ganga Rathnayake), Kandy, Sri Lanka. Area: 196 m². Completed: 2023. Photography by Sajith Sivayogaraj and Kolitha Perera.

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