Building Beside: The Mariwala Estate Annexe, Lonavala
Adding to an existing estate is harder than starting from scratch. You are in conversation with what is already there — the main house, the landscape, the history of the site. The annexe had to belong without imitating.
There is a particular discipline required when you are adding to something that already exists and already works. The Mariwala estate in Lonavala — a private residential property set in the green hills outside Mumbai — had its own logic, its own relationship to the land. Our brief was to design an annexe: additional accommodation that would function independently but belong visually and spatially to the whole.
The Challenge of Addition
The temptation when adding to a property is either to match exactly — producing something that looks like a pastiche of the original — or to contrast completely, which can feel like an intrusion. Neither satisfied us here. Instead, we looked for the underlying logic of the existing house: the proportions of its openings, the way it met the ground, its relationship to the treeline. These became our constraints, not the surface details.
Landscape as Structure
Lonavala has a particular quality of light — diffuse, green-filtered, cooler than Mumbai even in summer. We oriented the annexe to make the most of this, placing the main living spaces to face the valley and the morning light. The roof form responds to the topography rather than ignoring it. Stone used in the boundary walls ties the new building to the ground it sits on.
When a building feels like it belongs to its site rather than having been placed on it, the people inside feel that too. That sense of rightness — of shelter that is also a part of the landscape — is what we were working towards.