The Magical Pune Home With Moving Walls And Hidden Rooms

In architecture, a folly is a construction that serves no purpose. A structure created merely for decoration and if it has functional qualities, its extravagance sets it far above any others in its class. When the talented architects at The Busride Design Studio, Ayaz and Zameer Basrai, were commissioned to create a home for two young entrepreneurs they decided to take the concept of a folly and make magic with it. Their brief was simple ‘make mistakes’, what followed can only be described as a creative explosion with The Folly House being the incomparable aftermath.

Any designing process begins with a brief - and this was no different, although it was as unique as they come. The brief of The Folly House pointed towards enabling the couple to work from home so that they could spend more hours with the kids. It was to re-format the apartment space entirely to create an environment of wonder for the kids, to explore new formats for living, partying, relaxing, sleeping, and playing. Ayaz says, “The brief was just the right springboard, to guide the process but not spell out the outcome.”

The playfulness and folly of the home really emerges from the most basic understanding of what it is to really live in a home. Floor plans of apartments and houses have very distinct bed rooms, living rooms, entertainment rooms - a room that you have to fit into, not the other way around. The Busride broke this mould by exploring the concept of exteriority in interior spaces. “We sought to turn the apartment space on its head where spaces were not imagined as rooms, but as continuous space occupied by objects. The folly house explores the concept of ‘living with objects’. Technically when you are ‘inside’ this apartment you are actually ‘outside’ your home objects. The sense of rooms is completely altered,” Zameer describes. We see this with the cuboid structure that opens up into the living room, the bed that recedes into the wall and disappears from sight - kinaesthetic architecture on a whole new level. The room comes to life depending on the way it’s used, and who uses it. No one room is static - there is a constant flow in it’s use and purpose, evolving to suit the needs of the person living in the space for that moment.

There’s something to be said for the quasi rebellious manner in which The Busride works. Without shying away from being anything short of brutally honest, Ayaz says “ There’s tremendous respect to be given to ambiguity, the simple refusal to submit to cliches of luxury and this aspirational lifestyle that is so predictable it’s boring. The same crap pervades the same hollowed out homes. Fake homes, fake people. Strangely enough we haven’t worked on too many residential projects because the idea of walking into a fancy store and buying some overpriced piece of junk didn’t really feel like our cup of tea.” He reiterates the need to envision what the space can house, rather than finding things in a catalog and making them fit one way or another.

A house tells a story of its inhabitants, after all. This house, in particular, is like a canvas. Take the living room for instance — “The underside of the folly offers an undulating cave-like space for the kids to play. We illustrated the entire underbelly as a hypothetical, map of the world. The only real places on this map are places that are memorable to the family or places they’ve always wanted to visit. So contrary to the abstract curves of the folly above, the underside of the folly has been highly personalised” Ayaz describes.

Truly a culmination of thought and design experiments over time, The Folly House holds a sense of unpredictability at it’s core. Nothing really is what it seems - and this versatility in design is what we live for. Scroll on to immerse yourself within the follies this home contains.

Feature Image Courtesy Kunal Bhatia via Arch Daily