08 · Villa
The Monsoon Retreat
Teak, grey stone and silver light: a weekend house built to be most beautiful in the wettest four months of the year.
- Location
- Alibaug, India
- Year
- 2024
- Area
- 590 m²
- Duration
- 21 months
A Mumbai family used their coastal house only in winter. They asked us to make the monsoon the reason to come.
Deep verandas, teak screens and a continuous water channel turn rainfall into the principal event. The interior palette was set against grey monsoon light rather than sunshine.
- Interior architecture
- Furniture design
- Landscape coordination
- Turnkey delivery
- Monsoon Grey#7C8288
- Teak#7A5334
- Rain Silver#B7BDBE
- Leaf#3F4F3C
- Burma teak
- Reclaimed, oiled, slatted screens
- Kota stone
- Honed grey, laid wet-jointed
- Rattan
- Hand-caned in Kerala
- Lime plaster
- Tinted with local grey earth
Two thousand millimetres
Alibaug receives over two metres of rain between June and September. Most houses hide from it.
Rooms with a wet edge
Every principal room has a 2.4m veranda, and every veranda drains into a visible channel. Water is never concealed.
Chosen wet
All samples were reviewed under a hose. Anything that darkened unpleasantly when soaked was rejected.
Caned by hand
Four hundred and twelve square metres of teak slatting and every seat caned by a family workshop in Ernakulam.
Silver, not gold
Artificial light was specified cool and low. The house is meant to feel like an overcast afternoon even at nine at night.
- Interior Architecture
- Nesva Studio
- Site Direction
- Rhea Kapadia
- Caning
- Ernakulam Cane Works
- Photography
- Ishaan Rao
Next Project
Earling Residence
Delhi · 2025
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Let us compose a spacethat belongs only to you.
- Telephone
- +91 9999512096
- Studios
- India
- Availability
- Commissions worldwide
All enquiries are handled in confidence. A significant portion of our work is never published; where discretion is required, we operate under private terms and no imagery leaves the studio.