Malik Architecture demonstrates a typical highbrow resilience in carving out a non-interventionist design for a home at a hilltop in Alibag. With Arjun Malik’s sensitivity and astuteness at play, this ‘home in the hills’, literally, is a metaphoric design that epitomises the constant back-n-forth, old-n-new, innovative-conventional nexus that is a part of life per se. Surrounded by rolling contours, the proximal sea and the distant Mumbai skyline, the conceptual design of this home is a clear-cut departure from the ‘stepped terrace’ typology that one would conventionally employ on a heavily contoured site. Doing away with the usual massive excavation that precludes the seamless ingress of natural landscape contours, the house here partakes of the hilly topography - its concrete planes making contact with the ground, while steel floats above it. Quite simply, the basic premise sees the home as a tool that maximally interprets the landscape. Two distinct masses or blocks at a distance of 10 metres make contact with the earth, splitting the home into dissimilar pockets, while creating a natural courtyard within where the hill can flow through the ‘built form’.
