Architect Earthmakers / Work / 05
05Residential
Chandigarh
A family house planned around two existing olives, with the entry court kept as the only room that has no roof.
Sheet
05 / 09
Typology
Residential
Status
Built
Media
Visualisation
The record
Olive Court House
- 01Year
- 2023
- 02Area
- 310 m²
- 03Status
- Built
- 04Role
- Architecture and interiors
The idea
Two mature olives on the plot were non-negotiable, so the plan was drawn around them before anything else was fixed. The house wraps three sides of the trees and leaves the fourth open to the drive, which turns the arrival sequence into a courtyard rather than a path.
The court
Keeping the trees meant accepting their root spread, which set the building line further back than the plot would otherwise allow. The compensation is that the court reads as generous rather than left over, and every principal room looks into it.
Paving runs right up to the glass on all three sides, so there is no threshold detail to interrupt the view across. In practice the court does the work a hallway would do in a conventional plan.
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Materials
The palette is short on purpose: local stone for anything that touches the ground, vertical timber battens above, and dark aluminium for every opening. Nothing is painted, which keeps the maintenance schedule to washing down the stone.
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Credits
Architecture
AEM
Landscape
Placeholder Landscape Studio
Images on this page are visualisations of an unbuilt design, not photographs of a completed building.
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