Living
A textured dark wall behind the sofa is the only surface in the apartment without books on it.
The Reading Room
An apartment built around four thousand books, where the library is not a room but the walls of every room.
- Location
- Kochi, India
- Area
- 1,900 sq. ft.
- Type
- Residential
- Year
- 2024
- Scope
- Complete Interior + Joinery
- Programme
- 6 months
§ 01
Project story
An apartment built around four thousand books, where the library is not a room but the walls of every room.
The clients had spent thirty years accumulating a library and had never had anywhere to put it. Rather than give the books a room, we gave them the plan: shelving runs continuously at 300 mm depth around the whole apartment, interrupted only by doors and windows.
Four thousand books is roughly two and a half tonnes. The existing slab took it, but only after we spread the load across the perimeter walls rather than concentrating it in one room — which is how the idea for continuous shelving arrived in the first place.
A ring: entrance, living, dining, kitchen, study, bedroom, back to entrance. The shelving is the thread that runs through all of it, so every room is visibly part of the same idea.
Meera Anand, Devika Raghunath
§ 02
The design
Five materials carry the whole project. Everything else is a variation on one of them.
Oiled AshShelving and joinery
Wool CarpetLiving and bedroom
Chalk PlasterCeilings and free walls
Green MarbleKitchen and bathroom
Antique BrassRails, hooks, ironmongery
§ 03
Room by room
Study
The one room that is only books. A desk, a chair, a lamp, and shelving on all four walls including above the door.
Kitchen
White and timber, deliberately quieter than the rest of the flat, with green marble as the only strong note.
Bedroom
Shelving stops 1.4 m above the bed. Above that line the walls are bare, because the clients wanted somewhere for their eyes to rest.
Bathroom
Green marble, a single basin and a mirror that opens on both sides.
Dining
A timber table under a single candlestick, with the library on three sides of it.
The shelving, the window seat, the dining table and the bed. All in the same oiled ash, all detailed with a 4 mm reveal at every junction.
Every shelf run is lit from a concealed channel at its top. The result is that the apartment appears to be lit by the books.
§ 04
The plan
Public floorServiceCoreStorePrivateOutdoor
- 1
- 6
- South-west, two aspects
- 1,900 sq. ft. on one level
§ 05
Gallery
Casa Terra