Choosing Materials for a Bangalore Home: An Honest Guide

A house is the sum of its materials. Long after the drawings are archived, the walls, floors and ceilings a family lives with are what remain. Getting the palette right matters — for climate, for embodied carbon, and for the quiet dignity a home carries as it ages.

Compressed stabilised earth blocks (CSEB)

For most of our residences, CSEB blocks made within a hundred kilometres of site form the primary wall material. They are load-bearing, dimensionally accurate, and carry a fraction of the embodied energy of fired brick. Left exposed, they weather to a warm ochre that softens with every monsoon.

Lime plaster over cement render

Lime plaster breathes. It allows walls to release trapped moisture in the monsoon and re-absorb it in the dry season. It also carries a much lighter environmental footprint than cement render, and gives interiors a soft, hand-worked quality that flat paint cannot fake.

Reclaimed teak and rosewood

For joinery, we specify reclaimed hardwood wherever the client's budget allows. Old teak beams from dismantled houses, rosewood salvaged from decommissioned railway carriages — these arrive already tempered by fifty or a hundred years of use, and are almost impossible to source new at any responsible price.

Terracotta and kota stone

For floors that must survive children, dogs and monsoon slush, kota stone in a natural honed finish is difficult to beat. In verandahs and courtyards, we use hand-laid terracotta tiles. Both age visibly and gracefully.

The best materials are the ones the region already knows how to make, transport and repair.

Steel, glass and concrete still appear in our projects — but always where they are structurally or spatially indispensable, and rarely where a gentler material would do the job.