Girija Regmi · Dwelling
Chautari
Tiny houses, eco villages,
and the rooms inside them.
A chautari is a stone platform built around a peepal and a banyan planted together, at the point on a path where a person carrying a load would want to set it down. It is the only public building in the village that nobody had to be persuaded to use.
Walk through the models →The project
A house, a village, and a day spent inside both.
We are designing a small house backwards from one whole day — waking, cooking, working, receiving someone, being ill, being old in it — then the piece of land that holds forty of them, then the rooms and the objects that make the difference between a shelter and somewhere you want to be.
Everything here is published as it matures, drawings and dimensions included, so that it can be built by someone who is not us.
01
Tiny houses
Twenty-eight square metres, designed around the reach of an arm rather than a floor plan. Built to be repaired, in material we can name the source of.
02
Eco villages
Where the water is, how far the neighbour is, where people are forced to pass each other. A settlement is mostly a set of distances, and the distances are the design.
03
Interiors
Every surface either useful or beautiful, and where possible both. Light through the whole day, air that moves, and things kept where the hand puts them down.
In the browser
Turn it over before it is built.
Drag to orbit, scroll to come closer. On a phone, two fingers to zoom — and on Android, the cube icon puts the house on the floor in front of you at full size.
The model
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Four metres six by six metres two, on a dry-stone plinth half a metre high. The gable faces the path, because a small building reads as a house from its gable and as a shed from its long side.
Decisions so far
- The plinth is 520 mm. High enough that the timber never stands in wet ground, and exactly the height at which a person sits down on it without deciding to.
- The roof overhangs by 380 mm. Rain leaves the plaster alone, the high summer sun stops at the glass, and the low winter sun comes the whole way into the room.
- The deck is 2.6 m deep. Below about two metres it is a place you pass through. At 2.6 a table and four chairs fit, and the outside becomes the room you use for most of the year.
- The bed is over the kitchen, not beside it. It puts the only low ceiling in the house where you are lying down, and leaves the full four metres of ridge over the part of the room you stand up in.
- The water sits above every roof. It arrives by gravity. There is no pump, so there is nothing to fail on the day it is needed, and the fall from the tank is what the whole site plan is arranged around.
- No house is more than ninety seconds from the tree. The paths cross at the chautari rather than at the entrance, so the walk to a neighbour passes the one place people are already sitting.
Build it with us
If you have land, or a house you want designed around your own day, write.
Chautari is the studio's own work, and some of it is for other people.
Get in touch →