Casa Solana
Nine houses that disappear into a hillside
Location
Awas, Alibaug
Typology
Residential
Status
Completed
Completion
2025
The brief asked for nine houses with a view. We read it the other way round: nine houses that don't spoil the view for anyone else.
Nine private villas cut into a laterite slope above the Konkan coast, roofed in planted earth so the hill reads unbroken from the sea.
Project data
- Typology
- Private villas
- Houses
- 9
- Plot
- 6.2 hectares
- Built area
- 4,100 m²
- Roof
- 400 mm planted earth
- Walls
- Site-cut laterite block
- Certification
- GRIHA 5 Star
- Completed
- March 2025
- Coordinates
- 18.6414° N, 72.8722° E
A laterite slope, forty minutes from the ferry
The land falls thirty-two metres from the ridge to the treeline. Every previous scheme for the site had terraced it — cutting flat pads and retaining the difference in walls, which is the cheapest way to build and the fastest way to lose a hillside.
We cut into the slope instead. Each house is set into the grade on three sides, with only its western face and courtyard open. From the water, the hill still reads as a hill.
The roof is the ground
Each villa carries 400 millimetres of planted soil across its roof, continuous with the slope above it. The planting is entirely native Konkan scrub, specified from a survey of the site's own vegetation before any work began.
The thermal effect is not incidental. Peak internal temperatures run eight to eleven degrees below ambient in May without mechanical cooling. None of the nine houses has air conditioning in its primary living spaces.
Stone from within four kilometres
The laterite excavated from each plot was cut into block and returned to the same house as its walls. What the site gave up, it got back — a closed loop that removed roughly 340 truck movements from a coastal road that cannot bear them.
Lime plaster, local teak, and a single run of Kota stone flooring complete the palette. There are four materials in the entire project.
A weekend house should be the quietest object on its own hillside. Ours are buried, which is the only way we know to guarantee it.
— Ira Naravane, Founder
The building as a study model, not a render.
Every scheme begins as stacked volumes on the studio table. This is that model, rebuilt — it turns with the page, and it shows the argument of the building rather than a marketing image of it.
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