Design Team
Rooshad Shroff, Aneri Mehta, Khushali Chawda, Vartika Jangid, Haroon Mohammed
The Alibaug Retreat is a privately-owned property upon which stand two villas situated on a heavily contoured site.
House Two has a more secluded, detached air, affording occupants an intimate getaway and solitude; like House One, it features five bedrooms, extensively landscaped outdoors and a large swimming pool. A home away from home (the retreat is an hour away from Mumbai by boat), the chief idea behind its design was a rendering that would create a feel vastly different from a city dwelling. We wanted the site to capture the best of its natural surroundings, remotely located as it is among the trees, with a great view of the mountains. The house was focused on the outdoors, in order to frame these vistas.
The structure is fragmented into individual, stand-alone rooms spread across the landscape, each facing a natural vista or then the direction of the sunrise/sunset. All the rooms also feature an extended deck and their own private outdoor space, with lots of greenery within the interiors. They are connected by open-air pathways leading from one to the other, and a circular inner courtyard helps bind them together as a cohesive whole.
In terms of the material used, we opted for as many vernacular options as possible; walls are made of rammed earth using local soil, the wood has also been locally sourced and the floor is concrete. Terracotta was used on much of the home’s exterior as well as on the shingles of the pitched roof, designed to withstand Alibaug's heavy monsoon.
