Studio Saransh Carves a 14,000 Sq Ft Home Around Courtyards and Orchards in Gujarat

On the outskirts of Vapi, Gujarat, surrounded by orchards that soften the edge between town and countryside, Studio Saransh has completed a 14,000 square foot residence that treats mass and void as equally important design materials. PBR House is organized as two wings, one public and one private, joined by a double-height vestibule and punctuated by courtyards that pull the surrounding landscape deep into the plan. The result is a home that feels expansive without relying on spectacle, grounding itself in stone, timber, and carefully controlled daylight.

What makes the project worth studying is the way it manages scale. Seven bedrooms across 1,300 square meters could easily produce something bloated, but the courtyard strategy breaks the volume into comprehensible pieces. The house steps down to intimate proportions at the poolside, rises to triple height at the entry, and uses a single staircase as a sculptural event that ties those different scales together. Every material decision, from grey limestone cladding on the exterior to cast-in-situ terrazzo flooring inside, reinforces a sense of weight and permanence without ever feeling heavy.

Limestone and Timber: A Facade That Earns Its Gravity

The street-facing elevation is composed of cuboidal limestone volumes offset by vertical timber screens. It is a blunt, confident facade that refuses to ingratiate itself with its neighbors. The grey limestone panels give the house a monolithic quality, while the timber slats introduce rhythm and depth, particularly where they sit recessed within concrete frames. Planted beds at the base anchor the volumes to the ground and provide a modest buffer between domestic life and the road.

Studio Saransh avoids the trap of treating a facade as decoration applied to a box. Here, the exterior reads as the actual structure, because it largely is. The off-white granite cladding and limestone create a tonal range that shifts with the light: cool and flat under overcast skies, warmer and more textured in direct sun. The timber screens are functional, filtering light to the rooms behind, but they also do important compositional work, breaking up what would otherwise be unrelieved masonry walls.

Poolside Proportions: Where the Mass Steps Down

The rear of the house reveals a different character entirely. Where the street facade is a defensive arrangement of stacked cubes, the pool side opens up, stepping down in section and dissolving into decking, water, and tropical planting. At dusk, the limestone volumes reflected in the still pool turn the composition into something close to a Barragán exercise in geometric abstraction, though the material palette stays firmly rooted in Gujarat rather than Mexico City.

The site plan places the pool and landscaped social area to the north and east, while a kitchen garden occupies the western edge. It is a pragmatic division: the pool deck becomes a social extension of the living room, while the garden serves the kitchen. Palm trees and dense tropical plantings act as vertical counterpoints to the horizontal mass of the house, and the garden itself becomes a room without walls.

The Vestibule and Staircase as Spatial Engine

The central vestibule is the hinge of the entire plan. A double-height space with polished grey floors and woven pendant lights (made, notably, from banana fiber paper in an origami-inspired form), it funnels visitors toward the courtyards beyond. The planted interior courtyard visible through the vestibule creates an immediate connection between arrival and landscape, a threshold that is simultaneously indoors and outdoors.

The staircase within the larger courtyard deserves particular attention. It begins as a solid terrazzo base, transitions through metal and wooden floating treads, and culminates in a suspended landing that hovers within the courtyard void. Viewed from above, the intersecting timber treads and metal railings read as a piece of spatial drawing. It is the one moment where the architects allow themselves genuine drama, and it pays off because the surrounding spaces are restrained enough to let it land.

Living Spaces: Timber Ceilings and Borrowed Views

The public wing's living and dining areas occupy the ground floor, oriented to maximize views toward the pool and orchards. Exposed timber beams and angled wood-paneled ceilings give these rooms a warmth that contrasts with the cooler stone surfaces in the circulation zones. Floor-to-ceiling glazing frames the tropical planting as a kind of living wallpaper, though one that changes seasonally.

A consistent design move runs through these spaces: the skirting is elevated to sill level, creating a continuous horizontal datum that unifies rooms of very different character. It is a small detail, but it disciplines the interiors, giving the eye a resting line below the shifting play of light across ceilings and walls. The timber-framed openings that look through planted beds toward the pool layer interior and exterior in a way that makes the 14,000 square feet feel even larger than it is.

Interior Courtyards: Landscape as Infrastructure

The courtyards are not merely decorative voids. They are the primary ventilation and daylighting strategy, pulling air and light into the center of a deep plan that would otherwise require mechanical solutions. One linear courtyard connects the dining and living areas and leads out to the pool deck; the larger courtyard, anchored by the central staircase, serves the private wing's bedrooms. Planted beds beneath ceiling skylights blur the line between garden and room.

In a hot, humid climate like Vapi's, courtyards also create microclimates: shaded zones where air can cool before entering living spaces. Studio Saransh understands this vernacular logic and deploys it without nostalgic costuming. The courtyards are paved in polished stone, not terracotta or rammed earth. They feel contemporary, even clinical, which makes the vegetation growing within them more striking by contrast.

Private Wing: Bedrooms as Curated Retreats

Seven bedrooms in a single house is a program that demands differentiation. Studio Saransh achieves this through variation in ceiling treatment, floor level, and view orientation rather than through radically different spatial types. Terrazzo platform beds appear in several rooms, their solid mass echoing the limestone exteriors and creating a visual continuity between inside and out. Sliding glass doors open bedrooms directly onto planted courtyards or palm-lined views, making each room feel like an individual pavilion rather than a cell in a corridor.

Exposed timber joists in several bedrooms bring the ceiling plane down to a human scale, countering the double-height drama of the vestibule. Recessed wall lighting slots replace conventional bedside lamps, keeping surfaces clean. It is an austere palette by the standards of residential interiors in India, but the quality of the materials, particularly the terrazzo and lime plaster walls, provides enough texture to keep the rooms from feeling cold.

Material Details: From Terrazzo to Banana Fiber

The staircase detail repays close looking. Vertical metal balusters sit against a two-tone wall, their slender profiles drawing a graphic line that continues the rhythm of the exterior timber screens at a finer grain. The transition from terrazzo base to timber treads registers the shift from public ground floor to private upper level, a material code that the house deploys consistently.

Bathrooms lean into a darker, more luxurious register. Dark marble wall tiles and freestanding black tubs introduce a palette that doesn't appear elsewhere in the house, marking these spaces as genuinely separate from the limestone and terrazzo world outside. Green marble vanities with round mirrors reflect the origami-style pendant lights, a playful moment in an otherwise disciplined interior. The banana fiber paper pendants are a smart choice: handcrafted, light-transmitting, and visually warm, they provide the counterpoint that machine-finished stone surfaces need.

Thresholds and Corridors: The In-Between Spaces

A house this large lives or dies in its corridors and thresholds, and Studio Saransh treats these as seriously as any primary room. Timber-lined passages with curved walls and built-in cabinetry feel generous rather than utilitarian. Exposed wood ceiling joists run continuously through these connective spaces, knitting disparate wings into a single spatial experience. Even the recessed entrance, visible from the courtyard past a sculpted pine tree, is choreographed: you arrive through compression before being released into the vestibule's double height.

The presence of a dog in one of the corridor photographs is an unintentional but telling detail. It confirms what the plan suggests: that these are not ceremonial passages but genuinely used routes through daily domestic life. The timber ceiling slats filter light and provide acoustic softness, making what could be an echoey stone tunnel into something warm and navigable.

Why This Project Matters

PBR House succeeds because it resists the two most common failures of large Indian residences: the tendency to overload surfaces with decorative detail, and the opposite temptation to strip everything back to a featureless minimalism imported wholesale from European precedents. Studio Saransh charts a middle course, using local materials like grey limestone and cast-in-situ terrazzo to build a tectonic language that belongs to its site and climate. The courtyard typology is ancient, but its execution here, with polished stone pavers, clerestory skylights, and a staircase that transforms from solid to transparent as it rises, is unmistakably contemporary.

What we find most compelling is the scalar intelligence. A 14,000 square foot house with seven bedrooms could have been a compound or a mini-hotel. Instead, the courtyard strategy and the careful stepping down of volumes toward the pool create a home that feels intimate at every threshold. The material tonality extends from exterior to interior through shifting palettes rather than blunt repetition, and the details, from elevated skirting lines to banana fiber pendants, reveal an office thinking at every scale simultaneously. For architects working on large residential programs in warm climates, this is a project worth close study.

PBR House by Studio Saransh, located in Vapi, Gujarat, India. 14,000 sq ft (1,300 sq m). Completed in 2024. Photography by Ishita Sitwala.

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