Designed by 23 Degrees Design Shift, the Antriya House represents a thoughtful approach to multi-generational family living, serving as a weekend retreat for the Agarwal family in Muchintal, a quiet village on the southern outskirts of Hyderabad, India. The project, completed in 2025, emerged from extensive consultations between architects Srikanth Reddy, Neelesh Kumar, and Raghuram with brothers Sachin and Nitin Agarwal, who sought to create a space that would accommodate their joint family's diverse needs across three generations.
The design process began in 2021 when the Agarwal brothers approached the architectural firm with a vision for a family weekend home. The architects requested a comprehensive brief that would incorporate the perspectives of all three generations within their joint family structure. This inclusive approach revealed a complex web of relationships and needs, from retired parents offering guidance on family and business matters to young adults discovering their place in the world beyond high school.
The clients operate multiple family businesses ranging from steel manufacturing to jewelry, with the weekend home strategically located along the route to their steel factory. This proximity suggested the property might see more frequent use than typical weekend retreats, leading to a design that distributes maintenance responsibilities between older and younger family members. The architects discovered that beyond spatial requirements, the family sought a place that would strengthen their bonds and provide a proud venue for hosting friends and extended family.
Situated on a five-acre narrow and linear site, the property presented unique challenges and opportunities. The land contained minimal vegetation except for one significant peepal tree (Ficus religiosa) in the western portion. With access from the eastern side, the architects positioned the main building block toward the west, where they found suitable construction ground free from the sheet rock and boulders that characterized much of the site.
The approach to the house features a curvy organic driveway that winds across the center of the site, carefully navigating around existing boulders and rock formations. This creates an engaging arrival experience enhanced by a series of low-height vision-blocking walls that conceal the house until visitors reach the drop-off canopy. The driveway serves as more than mere circulation, with various activities positioned along its length to maximize the site's functionality.
These carefully planned activities reflect the family's memories and aspirations. A grape garden recalls childhood weekends when Sachin and Nitin would visit family vineyards with their grandparents to pick fruit. Sports facilities and an ATV mud track cater to younger family members, while a semi-open outdoor kitchen accommodates larger gatherings. A thoughtfully designed rock garden incorporates existing boulders with desert palm trees and bougainvillea, connecting to the family's Mediterranean travel experiences.
The house itself employs three linear stone walls as fundamental design elements, providing direction, privacy, and human-scaled coziness. The first wall, positioned on the north side with an adjacent floating pathway, guides visitors from the drop-off area toward the semi-open veranda while providing privacy for the pool area beyond. Pool privacy emerged as a crucial requirement in the client brief, ensuring comfortable use by all family members regardless of age.
Despite its private nature, the pool area maintains connection with the natural environment through strategic wall offsets that allow dense landscaping to flourish without compromising visual privacy. The center of the pool area remains open to the sky while surrounding walls provide necessary screening, creating an intimate outdoor space that feels both secluded and connected to nature.
The main house is accessed via a pathway elevated four feet above ground level, leading to spaces organized around the second stone wall that bisects the structure. This central wall separates common areas including living spaces, dining areas, verandas, and kitchen from private bedroom quarters. All spaces feature generous 15-foot internal volumes, with an intermediate slab at 10 feet creating varied spatial experiences throughout the home.
A key architectural feature involves cantilevered overhangs that vary from eight to ten feet in span, running continuously around the house. These overhangs divide external walls into 9-foot glazing sections below and 2.5-foot clerestory windows above. The deep overhangs provide consistent shading throughout the day, reducing heat gain while maintaining unobstructed views. Vegetation visible through clerestory windows creates dramatic interior lighting effects as natural light filters through the greenery.
The entire house appears to float above a water body that encircles the structure, serving both aesthetic and practical purposes. This moat-like feature helps deter snakes and other crawling creatures that naturally occur in rural settings, while the floating effect is enhanced by strategic landscape design that positions curated shrub plantations around the water's edge.
Central to the design concept are invisible axis lines that dissolve the house's boundaries in both east-west and north-south directions, creating visual permeability and lightness. These axes terminate at four nodes featuring weeping willow trees surrounded by stone-paved seating areas, further integrating the built environment with natural elements.
Landscape design plays a crucial role in the home's environmental performance and social functionality. Dense tree plantations are positioned 40 feet from the house with open lawns between, ensuring uninterrupted airflow from all directions. These lawns emit minimal heat compared to hardscape surfaces, reducing ambient temperatures around the structure while providing space for the family's regular social gatherings.
Coconut trees are strategically placed near the house to break down its scale and complement its form, while curtain creepers growing from overhang edges provide additional shading and create gentle movement when breezes pass through. The hierarchical plantation design in distant areas creates picturesque views from every opening in the house, establishing varied visual depths and seasonal changes.
Upon reaching the veranda, visitors encounter a bold sculptural staircase that forms a dramatic backdrop to the semi-open lounge area. The veranda can be transformed into indoor space through sliding glazing systems, creating flexible arrangements for both family activities and social gatherings. This adaptability allows the space to function as either intimate family quarters or expanded entertainment areas as needed.
Among the five bedrooms, four are positioned on the ground floor to maintain the house's connection to the landscape, with only one bedroom on the southeast corner elevated to the first floor. This upper bedroom provides panoramic views of the entire garden and surrounding landscape, offering a unique perspective on the property's carefully orchestrated outdoor spaces.
The third stone wall runs along the southern periphery, screening service areas from main living spaces while maintaining the clean lines that characterize the overall design. This thoughtful separation ensures that functional requirements don't compromise the home's aesthetic and experiential qualities.
Material selection reflects a deliberate move away from the polished urban environments the family knows well, embracing more authentic and less processed finishes. The entire house features neutral light gray lime plaster that helps the structure blend seamlessly with its natural surroundings. The three stone walls utilize locally sourced Khammam brown sandstone, while Markapuram slate covers all floor surfaces.
Both stone types are readily available within the Telugu states, grounding the architectural expression in local context and supporting regional suppliers. The Khammam brown stone provides rough, porous surfaces that encourage creeper growth, while the smooth yet undulating Markapuram slate invites barefoot walking, enhancing the tactile connection between inhabitants and their environment.
Solid reclaimed teak wood furniture and live-edge wood pieces used as benches and center tables reinforce the natural material palette, creating rich textures that celebrate the beauty of natural materials in built environments. Jute rugs and curtains blend seamlessly with this context, while black metal accents in glazing systems, lighting fixtures, hardware, and decorative elements provide striking contrasts that enhance the space's contemporary character.
The completed Antriya House achieves its goal of bringing multiple generations together more effectively than their primary urban residence. Named 'Antriya,' meaning 'space to self-reflect and become one with,' the home successfully balances openness with intimacy, modernity with timeless appeal, and architectural sophistication with genuine connection to nature and family traditions.
