Residential · Dibrugarh, Assam · Architecture + Interiors

Bokpara Bungalow

Type: Residential
Location: Dibrugarh, Assam
Size: 15,000 sq ft residence · 2,500 office · 36,500 site
Status: Under construction

A bungalow for six — three couples, a floor each, oldest at the bottom — set out to Vaastu from the shape of the plot inward. Architecture and interiors, ground-up, with the family’s office building across the drive.

The brief

A house for a family of six: the client and his wife, his sister and her husband, and his parents, with a floor of its own for each couple. Architecture and interiors together, built new from the footings. The house was to be Vaastu compliant throughout — not a layer applied over a finished plan, but the thing that decides where every room goes. Alongside that, a set of plain requirements: a swimming pool; parking enough for the household and for visitors, under cover and in the open; and lawn on both sides of the line the plot draws between private ground and public. On the same land, a separate three-storey office for the family’s construction business.

The response

The plot did not arrive as a rectangle. It runs up into an angular tail at one end, and an irregular figure is the one thing a Vaastu layout cannot start from — so the buildable ground was squared off first and the tail simply left out. It is still drawn on the layout, outlined and labelled left over area, because pretending it isn’t there would be worse than showing what was given up. Everything else is set out inside the rectangle that remains, between the 4 m village road on one side and the 5 m road at the end.

Inside that rectangle every space answers to its own call. The puja room, the kitchen with its dry store and utility, the master bedroom and its dressing closet, the entrance foyer, the water — none of them are placed for convenience or for the view; each sits where it is supposed to sit, and the plan is the result of resolving all of those against each other rather than composing them. What makes it hold together is that the centre is left open: an open-to-air courtyard at the middle of the footprint, unbuilt, which is also what lets the rooms draw light and air from inside the plan instead of from the boundary wall.

Then the family stacks, oldest at the bottom. The parents take the ground floor, the sister and her husband the first, the client and his wife the top, and the floor-to-floor never varies — plinth +450, then +4200, then +7950, the roof at +11700, and the pavilion carried to +14700 above all three. Every level repeats the one below because every level is doing the same job: each upper floor is a complete household in itself, with its own kitchen, dining, living room, master and guest bedroom. The courtyard repeats with them, open at the centre of all three, so every couple gets the same piece of sky. And the stair does not work alone — a six-person lift lands beside it on every floor, which is what lets a house stacked three couples deep stay one house as the family ages.

What stops three floors becoming three flats is the ground floor, which keeps the shared life of the house intact — a formal living room and a family living room, the dining area everyone eats at, the kitchen, the puja room and the gym. Putting the parents there does double duty: the eldest couple never takes a stair to get home, and the floor everyone comes down to is already occupied. The first floor then opens back into it, leaving the formal living room below as a double-height cutout rather than flooring over it.

Outside, the same split runs across the ground. The private half sits behind the house — the pool at 40 × 20, a 2,500 sq ft lawn beside it, a covered porch and a maintenance bay for the family’s own cars, screened from the drive by the gym block and reached past the sauna and changing room. The public half is the approach: an 18 ft road up from the 20 ft main gate, planted its whole length, with four open bays for the office, a separate visitor bay by the security post, and its own strip of lawn. Both halves get grass; the point is that someone arriving for the business never sets foot on the family’s.

Only the front performs. A random rubble base carries three storeys of arched loggia, the stair pulled clear of the plan and held behind a perforated screen running its full height, and above the top floor the massing steps back to the glazed pavilion. The entrance arch was drawn on a sheet of its own, sectioned through every moulding, because it is the one element the whole elevation turns on. Across the approach road the office follows the same instinct — cabins and a reception lobby below, open floor above, and a top storey that is living, including two staff units with their own kitchens and baths.

Materials

Random rubble stone base
18 mm stone coping on 25 mm mortar
Perforated masonry screen to the stair
Timber soffits and pergola
Timber pool deck
Rough-cut stone to the pool wall
230 mm brickwork, plastered

Where it stands

The frame is topped out and brick infill is under way; the dining terrace already has its floor down and a lawn strip planted. The office frame is up behind it. The photographs on this page run in build order, from the footings to the first finished surfaces — the renders and the drawing set are what the rest of it is being built towards.

The site

Drone view of the walled plot set among smallholdings, bamboo and tea, with open floodplain on the horizon

Straight-down drone view of the cleared plot, site sheds and stacked materials, tea rows running along one edge

Ground floor layout of the whole plot: house, pool and lawn to the west, office block and parking to the east, with the approach road between them

Structure

Excavated footing pit with a reinforcement mat tied and a column cage rising from it, bamboo grove behind

Cast columns with starter bars projecting, wrapped in hessian, plinth beams run between them

The full grid of plinth beams and column starters across the site, with workers placing reinforcement

Panoramic view of shuttering for the ground floor slab carried on dense bamboo propping, mixer and stacked bamboo in the foreground

Looking down into the frame at a forest of bamboo props supporting the slab formwork, with the courtyard void open through the middle

Inside the concrete frame at the double-height living space, floor still heaped with sand, workers spreading it

Workers forming the sloping off-centre bedroom roof in shuttering at dusk, bamboo props beneath

Wide view of the completed concrete frame with bamboo scaffolding, the stepped massing and projecting roof already visible

The bare concrete frame of the house in front, with the office block behind it already carrying red brick infill

A finished covered terrace during heavy rain, polished floor and a planted lawn strip beyond the parapet

First floor interior during construction, brick infill walls rising between columns with bricks laid out in rows across the slab

View out from the first floor covered balcony over a tea estate with shade trees, a table and chairs set up in the unfinished room

The house as designed

Dusk render of the front elevation from the road, stone base, stacked arched loggias and the perforated stair screen lit from within

Render of the entrance: a deep arch beneath a cantilevered timber soffit, timber door, and a stone sphere set in the drive

Elevated render looking across the swimming pool to the house, hills in mist behind

Render of the pool with a timber deck, rough stone boundary wall, planting and a timber pergola over the seating

First floor layout on grid A to G and 1 to 8, with dining, show kitchen, living area, library, master and guest bedrooms around a central open-to-air courtyard

Second floor layout with the master bedroom to the west, dining room, living room, guest bedroom, study and kitchen around the same central courtyard, opening to a terrace

North elevation drawing with floor levels marked, showing the stone base, arched loggia, screen tower and the roof pavilion above

East elevation drawing on grid lines 2 to 7, with the glazed ground floor and the way through to the sauna marked

West elevation flanked by sections HH and GG, with construction annotations for coping, plaster, drip courses and skirting

Detail sheet for the entrance arch: front, left and right elevations of the arch with sections through the cornice, base and brickwork

The office

Daytime render of the separate office block from the road, a pale three-storey building with a pergola deck on the roof

Dusk render from the parking porch showing the house on the left and the office on the right across the wet drive

Ground, first and second floor layouts of the office building side by side, with cabins, conference room, offices, and residential accommodation above

Where next

Little Miracles Montessori

Education · Built 2025→

All projects