The Holiday Home

A family home in Hisar commissioned in 2019 on the site of an old factory, planned around an L-shaped water body, a lawn and the factory's restored kupla chimney, now a fireplace station.

The brief was a single sentence. When the client first met Ar. Dipesh Panghal in 2019, he did not ask for a house for himself; he asked for a place his grandchildren would choose, the house they would name when they said, “Let's go to Dadu's house.” Completed in January 2023, the home has a built-up area of about 8,000 sq ft, with interiors by the studio's interior designer, Ar. Uma Panghal.

At the heart of the plan is an L-shaped water body in the north-east, placed as Vastu prescribes. The living area and the den sit along it behind full-height sliding glass, so that the corner reads as if it floats on the water. The entrance crosses it: pale stone steps rise over turquoise mosaic tile to a timber front door, beside a frangipani and a wall clad in grey stone. A timber deck extends the house to the north-west.

The ground floor holds the master bedroom, the den, the kitchen and the living spaces. The den is planned for films and family evenings, open to the garden. Even the pantry has a view of the water, the kitchen opens to the rear lawn, and the south-west master bedroom has a veranda onto a large lawn. In the photographs, the living room sets a cream sofa and a cognac leather-backed armchair before an old, weathered timber frame, with the dining beyond against a wall of vertical timber panelling and white pots on a black sideboard. A sitting corner looks through full-height glass at a clipped hedge and a creeper-covered boundary wall, and beneath the stair stands a horse sculpture welded from steel tubes and nuts.

Upstairs, each bedroom is given its own view: one opens to the garden, one frames the water body, and one looks into the canopy of an old gulmohar. One room has cane-backed armchairs on a herringbone timber floor under a timber-plank ceiling, with the red kupla chimney rising among the trees beyond the glass. Another is glazed on two sides around a white column and opens to a terrace. A third has a polished golden floor and a balcony with a timber ceiling and patterned tiles. The materials change from room to room, with timber flooring in one, Jaisalmer stone in another and Bharat flooring in the lobby. On the roof, solar panels are integrated within puff panels, and the tanks and pumps are kept out of sight, reached by a spiral stair.

The site's industrial past was kept rather than cleared. In the south-west corner stands the old factory's kupla, its chimney restored in rust red above a brick fireplace, with a ring of chairs on a paved circle in the lawn. Ar. Dipesh Panghal names it among his favourite spaces in the house: where the factory once made smoke, the family now gathers in the evening.

“Let's go to Dadu's house… let's go to the Holiday Home.”