Designing a home that makes space for the humanity of the residents
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. I was recently reading a piece on an Indian project featured in Wallpaper magazine. The 12,000 sq.
ft. residence displayed a multitude of craft and design interventions—the author describing it as an effort to bring “discovery into daily life". What struck me about the images is that for all the effort to stand out—and many high-cost housing projects now seem chiefly preoccupied by standing out—it had the pastel ubiquitousness of spaces created on a digital mood-board.
Many projects display several of the same design flourishes, from curvaceous edges and soft tones to the excessive use of wall treatments and furniture that seems better suited to a gallery than a home. It was a space surfeited with design flourishes, where not a single wall or surface has been left to breathe. There was an element missing in it, a fundamental physical attribute: let’s call it gravity.
Gravity is that quality of rooting, in the context of design it is an element that forces the viewer to contend with the ground, its realities and limitations. It forces you to consider how people will navigate a space over the long term. When a project looks hyper-realistic, like an over-stylised world from a Philip K Dick novel, it’s hard to imagine what life within must look like.
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