Earthy haven

It is hard to locate, the pretty brick house at the end of a mud lane in Nalanchira, Thiruvananthapuram. Sreebala and Jimmy have tucked it away and put it next to a plot of land that belonged to relatives. Bala, just back from a journey, moves about the house like a little girl, tossing the many books that she’d keep buying into corners of a study. Jimmy and she had just been talking about clearing them all, she says, as she describes the house they so fondly built together, four years ago.

“We didn’t want it to be typical, and we didn’t want it plastered, so we went to this young architect firm, to a man called Anand,” says the filmmaker and writer, comfortable in the cold air that the openness of the house would always bring. There are doors in every room to go outside and watch the green wilderness that the next plot is. “We wanted that openness,” she says, opening all the doors – from the dining space, from the kitchen. “We were also very particular about having a verandah, a feature that is increasingly disappearing from Kerala architecture. When there is no space, that is the first thing people take away. We have a 220 square feet verandah and put it wherever we found space,” she says. The house itself is 1,900 square feet standing on nine and a half cents of land.

Perhaps with all the greenery outside, and with the red floors and the minimal and natural furniture inside, you get a pleasant earthy feeling throughout the house. “We couldn’t get the red oxide flooring, so we went for rodeo red ceramic which has different designs on each piece,” Sreebala says. The floor is important because you see a lot of it. Another conscious decision. They didn’t want a lot of showpieces. They also didn’t want built-in materials, they prefer makeshift. So you have a lot of space to move about, no cramming.

The art pieces that hang on the walls are all from friends — Reema Narendran’s painting in the dining hall, Priyaranjal Lal’s art in the living, and Usha Ramachandran’s portrait of Bala on the way upstairs. “That one on the stairs is a gift Usha aunty gave me when I won the (Kerala Sahitya Academy) award,” says Sreebala, the writer. To write and read, she’d sometimes go to the bedroom upstairs, built same as the one below. The one below has a cane basket for a laundry hamper, and a lovely brown rest chair. A recliner is also in the living room, passed on from another writer friend, Ashitha.

Other miscellaneous objects have a room upstairs, leading to a large terrace. Openings on the terrace walls bring pretty patterns of sunlight inside the house.