Architects Sönke Hoof and Khushnu Panthaki Hoof have an uncanny gift for noticing the almost invisible – that fleeting detail, or lack thereof, that others might overlook. Yet on a summer’s day not so many years ago, as they left the golden clamour of Ahmedabad, in the Indian state of Gujarat, for the languid green of its hinterland, they arrived at a site that appeared to offer almost nothing at all.
Like many such plots on the city’s outskirts – some 30 to 40 minutes away, beyond the tightening grip of urban density – the land held no preordained landmark, no obliging ruin, no obvious architectural cue. What it did hold was a tumbledown one-room cottage, once a weekend getaway, which went largely unnoticed. And, at the centre, two old sapodilla trees, which decidedly did not. ‘The trees immediately anchored the place,’ recalls Panthaki Hoof, half of the Ahmedabad-based Studio Sangath, which she leads with Hoo, her husband. ‘Everything else felt negotiable.’
Tour this breezy Gujurat house by Studio Sangath
As it turned out, the trees were as central to the owners’ memory as they were to the land - silent sentinels to long-ago summers, to afternoons spent with parents and, years later, to gatherings with children, all instinctively drawn to the same pocket of shade. Best loved for its sweet, succulent fruit – chikoo to the locals – the sapodilla is often seen as a symbol of nourishment and seasonal abundance. To the architects, however, it offered something far more enduring: a generous, living shelter. Its thick, low-hanging leaves filtered the sunlight into a gentle, dappled glow, turning the space beneath into a haven of calm. The earth remained cool, the heat held at bay, so that the body sensed relief before the mind registered it. ‘In this climate, shade was not an abstract idea,’ Hoof says. ‘You felt it in your body the moment you stepped under the tree.’
In many ways, the sapodillas laid the groundwork long before the architects could, shaping a project that became ‘one totally different’ from what might otherwise have emerged. Rather than treating the trees as obstacles to be negotiated, the architects allowed their trunks and foliage to dictate the rhythm, orientation and spatial sequencing of the house. A generous wrap-around verandah now envelops the trees, creating a shared threshold between inside and out.
Windows are carefully placed to frame distant foliage, while in other moments, leaves are invited indoors, blurring distinctions between built form and landscape. Once pruned - not for effect, but to make the site more inhabitable - the sapodillas became an effective filter against the sun. Unlike the family’s former city home, which struggled with light and relied heavily on artificial illumination, this house allows daylight to remain present throughout the day. ‘The trees do the work for us,’ Hoof says. ‘They modulate the light far better than any device we could introduce.’
If there is one thing Hoof and Panthaki Hoof resist instinctively, it is the comfort of rules. This aversion reveals itself in their insistence on designing from the inside out - shaping spaces around life rather than façades – and in their fascination with delayed revelation. Here, architecture unfolds gradually. Passages narrow and release, thresholds multiply, and views are withheld just long enough to make their eventual appearance feel earned.
Bedrooms, at once cocooning and outward-looking, tuck themselves discreetly into the plan, offering edited glimpses of the garden. A family lounge, meanwhile, occupies the first floor, complementing the larger living space on the ground level and rising deliberately to the height of the foliage to meet the sapodilla canopy at eye level. ‘It’s a completely different way of engaging with the landscape,’ Panthaki Hoof explains. ‘You’re no longer looking down at the garden or up at the trees – you’re inside that layer.’ She describes the sensation as one of gentle levitation, a kind of bird’s-eye view that subtly shifts perception and induces calm.
Nature here is not ornamental. On the opposite wing of the house, a gym and spa spill out onto a lap pool that dissolves into a wild, untamed landscape. Developed in collaboration with Ahmedabad-based landscape practice Studio 23N|72E, the grounds resist manicured perfection in favour of local species and seasonal rhythms, encouraging birds, butterflies and thick undergrowth rather than attempting to control them. Monkeys frolic freely, and peacocks parade the edges; these interruptions are accepted as part of daily life, not treated as intrusions. ‘You can’t design this kind of setting and then expect it to behave,’ Hoof reflects. ‘The idea was always to coexist, not to curate.’
The architects approached the landscape much as they did the house itself: as something unresolved, composed of hidden corners and meandering views that invite non-linear exploration. Hoof attributes this quality not to calculation, but to intuition – a state of flow in which logic steps back, allowing site, climate, family aspirations and memory to guide each gesture. That balance between recall and reinvention surfaces again in the home’s sloping roofs, which quietly reference the family’s longtime city residence. The gesture is subtle - an echo rather than an imitation. ‘Memory can be a guide,’ Panthaki Hoof says, ‘but it shouldn’t become a constraint.’
Indeed, the most delicate challenge was knowing where to stop. Allowing the house to emerge without over-determining it meant resisting the temptation to resolve every corner, to account for every future possibility. This ethos of restraint finds material expression in a carefully calibrated palette of grey stone, exposed concrete, teak, charred wood and restrained accents of colour. Despite their apparent austerity, the materials carry a subdued warmth, their tactile qualities revealed slowly through wear, light and touch. For the architects, such paring back expanded rather than narrowed possibilities. ‘When you reduce choice,’ Hoof says, ‘you start paying attention.’
Hand-built elements reinforce this sensibility. The staircase, in particular, carries an irregularity that resists machine perfection. ‘People respond to it instinctively,’ Panthaki Hoof notes. ‘There’s something deeply human about objects that reveal how they were made.’
The collaboration hums with a quiet resonance: Panthaki Hoof’s grandfather – the great modernist Balkrishna Doshi, with whom she worked until his death in 2023, and whose famous Sangath office complex is also where Studio Sangath is located – had once known the owner’s father, and decades later, she and Hoof’s daughter would celebrate birthday parties of the owner’s child beneath the same sapodilla canopy. Long before the house took shape, life had already gathered here, folding time gently back upon itself. Today, memory and architecture murmur with the landscape, shaping a home defined as much by what is left open as by what is built – a place where past and present converge beneath the enduring shade of the sapodillas, carrying the weight of countless quiet summers.