SHROFFLEóN Wraps an Alibag House Around Courtyards, a Pool and a Rock-Formed Canopy

Alibag has become the weekend address of choice for Mumbai, and the houses going up along this stretch of the Konkan coast tend to follow a familiar script: a big lawn, a big pool, a big glass box. CASAVIVA Residence, completed in 2025 by SHROFFLEóN under Kayzad Shroff and Maria I J Leon, works with the same ingredients at a generous 20,000 sq ft. What it does differently is distribute them. The architects broke the program into clean geometric volumes and then cut those volumes open with landscaped courtyards and voids, so the garden is not something you look at from the house but something you keep passing through.

The interesting part is not any single gesture. It is the way the house treats climate and landscape as its main design tools. Deep overhangs, oriented openings and cross-ventilating courtyards carry the environmental load; the architects call these passive strategies rather than technological expression. Add a rock formation that shelters a lounge and frames the dining room, and you get a house whose most memorable moments happen at the edges, where stone, water and planting meet the building.

A Stone Front Built for Shade

From the outside, CASAVIVA reads as stacked and stepped masses of concrete and stone rather than one continuous facade. The stepping does real work here: each projecting slab shades the floor below, and the recesses give the coastal light somewhere to fall that is not a bedroom window.

The entrance wall is the clearest statement of intent. Stone cladding, a timber door and a frangipani throwing shadows across both. It is a modest threshold for a house this size, and that restraint suits a brief that asked for privacy and calm over display.

The Rock as Co-Author

The most unusual element on site is a rock-formed canopy that shelters a lounge beneath the upper volume. It behaves like a cave mouth set into the architecture: a shaded outdoor room where you would expect a conventional verandah. Banana-leaf planting and a trimmed lawn soften the transition, so the rock reads as landscape rather than set dressing.

Above it, a slatted upper facade rises behind dense trees and flowering shrubs. The slats filter light and views without closing the room off, a sensible response to sun and privacy in one move. Nearby, a wire-line mural on a white wall above the pool deck, with the grotto beyond, adds a graphic counterpoint to all that mass.

Water as the Middle Ground

The pool works as a spatial mediator between the stone-clad house and the garden, not just as an amenity. A timber deck, a gridded stone wall and a cantilevered upper floor all reflect in still water, which doubles the perceived depth of the terrace and cools the air moving toward the living spaces.

We particularly like the stepped pool edge facing the raised lounge. It turns the water into an extension of the floor plane, so stepping down into the pool feels continuous with stepping out of the living room.

Double Heights and a Travertine Spine

Inside, travertine walls and timber ceilings set the tone. The double-height lobby, with its dark floating staircase and potted tree, establishes the vertical void as the house's organizing idea. In the living room, striped sunlight falling across the floor shows the overhangs and screens doing their job: daylight enters, but broken up and tempered.

A weathered steel ring pendant hung below the timber ceiling gives the tall room a human-scaled focus, and the palm courtyard beyond keeps the eye moving outward. The palette is narrow, which is exactly why it holds together across a large floor area.

Rooms That Open Rather Than Look Out

The ground-floor lounges share a consistent move: full-height sliding glass doors behind sheer curtains, opening directly onto lawn, pool or courtyard. When these doors are open, the rooms stop being enclosures and become covered terraces. That is the cross-ventilation strategy made visible, and in a humid coastal climate it is the right priority.

The furniture is low and soft, with leather, bouclé, marble and quilted upholstery, and it stays out of the sightlines. A timber ceiling with clustered black pendants over one sofa and an open door to a planted courtyard show how the interiors rely on enfilade and framed openings rather than big statement pieces.

Dining Against the Rock

The dining room is where the rock formation pays off most directly. A long glass table and a branching pendant face the stone through floor-to-ceiling glazing, so meals take place against a natural backdrop rather than a feature wall. A second dining setting, with a black stone table in front of a timber-clad kitchen alcove, is more enclosed and domestic. Together they offer a choice between a room facing outward and a room facing inward.

Private Floors: Treetops, Bunks and Bathing

The bedrooms keep up the full-height glazing, but upstairs it frames tree canopies instead of lawn. That is a simple payoff of lifting the private rooms one level: the landscape still fills the window, but at a height that gives privacy without blinds.

The kids' room is the house's one playful departure. A blue perforated metal volume encloses a bunk bed beside a glazed wall that opens onto a terrace with a painted court circle. It is a room within a room, and it suggests the architects understood that a calm, timeless house still needs somewhere to be loud. The main bathroom returns to the core palette of marble, oak and plants by the window.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan shows a long block set into landscaped grounds, with the pool, a parking shed, a multipurpose court and a kids' play area distributed around it. On the ground floor, living, dining, kitchen and bedrooms gather around a courtyard that opens onto the pool deck. The upper floor arranges bedroom suites, a yoga room and kids' rooms around planted courtyards, which confirms that the voids organize both levels.

The sections show how the double-height void and the glazed bays alternate with solid stacked volumes, and how the pool sits sunken beside the lower wing. The two cladding details are the most revealing drawings in the set: one shows dry-fixed travertine on a framed peripheral beam aligned with the beam above, the other wet-applied travertine on a beam set three inches back. That level of attention to how stone meets structure explains why the facades read as carved mass rather than applied veneer.

Why This Project Matters

Luxury second homes rarely get credit for climatic intelligence, and they often do not deserve it. CASAVIVA is a useful counterexample. Its comfort comes from overhangs, courtyards and orientation first, and from mechanical systems second. Those are old lessons from Indian domestic architecture, applied here at a scale and finish level where clients usually default to sealed glass and air conditioning.

For designers, the takeaway is about distribution. By breaking a large program into volumes and threading landscape between them, SHROFFLEóN keeps a 20,000 sq ft house from feeling like one. The rock canopy, the stepped pool edge and the travertine details are what you remember, but the courtyards are what make the house work.

CASAVIVA Residence by SHROFFLEóN (Kayzad Shroff and Maria I J Leon), Alibag, India. Area: 20,000 sq ft. Completed 2025. Photography by Ishita Sitwala | The Fishy Project.

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