Srivari
Ekaya

We have never enjoyed doing the typical block-printed villa projects, or the gated communities that emerge from them. We have done a few, and have never been happy with what they eventually became.

This was a small parcel of land in a quiet neighbourhood in Coimbatore. We saw an opportunity to move away from the usual formula.

Yes, it was still a collection of villas. But we wanted to see if it could become something more.

We began to imagine a small community of homes, connected by streets and gardens, with terrace gardens woven into the spaces between them. A place where the spaces between the houses were as important as the houses themselves.

Could a gated community, small in number and intimate in scale, actually become a community?

Could children play on the streets? Could neighbours speak to each other across terraces? Could people meet casually in the gardens? Could the scale be small enough for people to recognise and know each other?

Landscape became an important part of the idea. Each villa was given its own visual identity, so that the whole would not become another monotonous repetition of identical houses.

The project is now on the ground, and we wait to see how it unfolds.

Almost all the villas were sold at the very beginning. We had created a narrative around what life could be like within this environment, which was intended to be used in marketing. Perhaps it was used. Perhaps it wasn’t.

But the story doesn’t really belong to the marketing.

The real story will begin when people move in.

And perhaps, over time, the people who inhabit this place will create the community we imagined.