Studio Saransh and IKSOI Stack a Pol-Inspired Multigenerational Home around a Heart-Shaped Stairwell in Ahmedabad

LJ House sits in one of the first residential neighbourhoods Ahmedabad built outside its walled city. That location matters more than it first appears. The house is a 6,300 sq ft, four-storey home for a family of six, designed jointly by Studio Saransh, which also led the interiors, and IKSOI. The two practices worked through a shared, iterative process. Their brief was a multi-generational home on a tight urban plot that could run as one household today and split into two independent units later.

What makes the project worth your attention is how it handles that tension. Contemporary Indian houses usually trade collective life for private square footage. LJ House reverses the priority. It borrows the social logic of the pol, the gated cluster of climate-responsive timber houses that defines old Ahmedabad, and turns it vertically. The result is a stacked framework organised around a single sculptural stair and a heart-shaped void. That void is the house's social spine, its light source and its main architectural argument.

A Guarded Face with One Generous Gesture

From the street, the house holds back. The terracotta plaster volume is pierced by few openings, and those on the upper floors are pushed deep into the wall. Each is sized for its orientation, so direct sun stays out. Behind the plaster, the external walls are double-layered with a cavity to cut heat gain. In a city where summer is the defining design condition, this restraint is a technical decision first and an aesthetic one second.

The single extravagance is the roofline. A concave, scooped parapet sweeps across the top of the mass and softens what would otherwise read as a fortified box. We think it works because it is the only move of its kind outside. Projecting ledges and slot windows keep the rest of the elevation quiet, so the curve lands as a signature rather than as decoration.

Thresholds, Boundary Walls and the Side Court

The approach repeats the pol's layered entry in miniature. A speckled stone boundary wall and a rust-coloured slatted pivot gate filter the street before you reach the house. Behind them, a side courtyard opens between the stepped plaster facade and the wall, with clay urns, palms and a shaded terrace under a large seed-pod tree.

These edges do real climatic work. Mesh screens carrying climbers, lattice panels over banana-leaf beds and the existing tree canopy all shade the walls before the sun reaches them. Planting here is part of the envelope, not something applied afterward to dress it up.

The Ground Floor as Shared Room

The house's large openings are reserved for the ground floor, and that is where collective life is concentrated. Living and dining flow into one another and open through glass walls to planted courts and a pink stone courtyard. A timber swing seat hangs in the living area, a familiar fixture in Gujarati homes, and the architects treat it as an anchor rather than a nostalgic prop.

Overhead, curved ceiling cutouts and a double-height dining zone under clustered paper pendants keep the base from feeling buried. Curved plaster walls stand in for partitions and gently define a sofa niche or an arched corridor without closing anything off. This is the grounded, inward level of the house, and it is meant to hold everyone at once.

The Heart-Shaped Stair

Everything turns on the stair. Black veined marble and stone treads rise through nested curved plaster walls, with a slim metal rail and a stone-capped balustrade. The stair sits beside an asymmetrical void that is shaped like a heart in plan, and at the top it ends in a skylight of the same outline. Daylight falls through the full height of the house and lands as shifting bands across landings and floors.

The move is sentimental on paper, and we expected it to read as a gimmick. It doesn't, because the shape is rarely legible from inside. What you experience is a series of soft, swelling walls that guide your eye upward, plus a landing generous enough to hold a sofa. The stair is also a place to pause, which suits a house that wants generations to cross paths.

Curves as Room Dividers on the Upper Floors

The plaster language continues upstairs. Curved walls with circular cutouts frame lounges, and an oval skylight washes light across a rounded parapet. Narrow stone stairs, lit by round wall lamps, tuck between volumes. These upper living areas are smaller and more contained than the ground floor. They give each generation a room of its own without cutting it off from the void.

A single flooring material runs through the whole interior, and it does a lot of quiet work. Because the floor never changes, the shifts in curvature, ceiling height and light read as the only boundaries. That keeps a vertically divided house feeling like one continuous home.

Private Rooms and the Open Top

The bedrooms are calm and lightly furnished: walnut and slatted timber, sheer curtains, and balcony openings into the tree canopy. Striped shadows from the deep-set openings fall across the stone floors, a reminder that the envelope is filtering sun all day.

The sequence ends in a partially enclosed terrace beneath the curved roof. A circular opening frames the sky, a pebble line crosses the paving, and rust-coloured animal sculptures sit in the hazy light. The family can use it together in the evening or alone in the early morning. Having moved from the inward base, you arrive at an open and elevated top, the pol's chowk set on a roof.

Plans and Drawings

The plans make the future split legible. The ground floor holds the open living and dining area, the kitchen, a bedroom and service rooms around a central core. The first and second floors each repeat a living space with two bedrooms and bathrooms, and the first floor adds a puja room. Shared vertical circulation means the house could be divided between these levels with little rework. The third floor reduces to a covered terrace, a multipurpose room and the heart-shaped void. The sections show how that void and a thick service shaft run the full height, and the east elevation shows the tall glazed stair bay under the sweeping roofline.

Why This Project Matters

Indian cities keep producing tall, tight-plot family homes, and most of them stack private floors with a lift and a lobby in between. LJ House shows another option. It turns circulation into the shared room, so the stair and void become the place where a joint family actually meets. That is a more useful lesson from the pol than any decorative reference to timber brackets or carved facades.

It is also a reminder that climate and sociability can follow the same logic. The cavity walls, recessed openings and planted edges keep the heat out. The single lit void draws people and daylight to the same centre. The house is not without sentiment, but its warmth is earned through section and plan, which is where it belongs.

LJ House by Studio Saransh and IKSOI. Location: Ahmedabad, India. Area: 6,300 sq ft (approx. 585 m²). Year: 2026. Photography: Ishita Sitwala | The Fishy Project.

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