Architects: OTLA– Architecture and Style
Area: 1,500 feet ² Year: 2024
Photography: Suryan Saurabh, Lokesh Dang
Design group: Krish Shah, Kashyap Bhagat, Megha Yadav
Products: Clay tiles, lime paint, teak wood
City: Mumbai, Maharashtra
Country: India
House # 2 is a domestic interior project in Mumbai created by OTLA– Architecture and Style as a contemplative household home formed by landscape, memory, and restraint. Inhabiting the first floor of a low-rise condominium, the 1,500-square-foot house ignores a thick cluster of mature gulmohar trees and an open space that has slowly transformed into a forested foreground. The style technique emphasizes sensory engagement with this setting through thoroughly positioned openings, low seating, and adjusted material options. Handcrafted clay tiles, lime-washed walls, and teak wood elements create a tactile, thermally responsive interior environment. Rather than focusing on official structure, the task foregrounds everyday use, cumulative living, and the combination of art and items collected with time. Rooted in the worths of a Gujarati Jain family, the home balances modernist clarity with cultural continuity, providing a peaceful, resilient domestic setting attuned to climate, routine, and shared life.
The design of Apartment or condo # 2 begins with a purposeful sensitivity to its immediate surroundings. Located simply twelve feet above ground level, the apartment or condo preserves a close visual and sensory relationship with the open land and mature gulmohar trees beyond. OTLA treats this proximity as a specifying spatial condition, enabling dappled light, shifting shadows, and seasonal variations to assist the company of interiors instead of depending on obvious architectural gestures.
Along the northern edge, bay windows are thoroughly raised beyond standard seating height to frame views of the forest while remaining understandable from a reclined or seated position within 
the spaces. These window specific niches function as engawa-like limits, using places for rest, observation, and pause. Apartment or condo # 2/ OTLA 30 Apartment or condo # 2/ OTLA 31 Sound, aroma, and motion from the outdoors filter inward, especially throughout the monsoon, enhancing an everyday awareness of climate and landscape. © Suryan Saurabh, Lokesh Dang © Suryan Saurabh, Lokesh Dang Materiality throughout the apartment is limited yet deeply referential. Handmade clay tiles extend across the floorings, linking the home to the client’s family’s ancestral ties to northern Gujarat and Rajasthan. White lime-washed walls temper the damp Mumbai climate while diffusing light throughout surface areas. Existing strengthened concrete elements are subtly articulated through chamfered edges and softened corners, allowing the 
structure to sign up without visual heaviness. © Suryan Saurabh, Lokesh Dang 
© Suryan Saurabh, Lokesh Dang The living-room forms the social nucleus of the home, organized around customized low baithaks that line the periphery of the space. Pigmented gaddis crafted from kala cotton encourage casual modes of sitting, reclining, and event. The absence of a traditional coffee table and the existence of a single tv assistance a collective rhythm of usage, accommodating everyday activities, shared meals, and quiet repose within the exact same spatial structure. © Suryan Saurabh, Lokesh Dang © Suryan Saurabh, Lokesh Dang Art, objects, and memory complete the interior narrative. Paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photos are incorporated across the apartment or condo as part of its architectural material instead of as applied design. A hidden bar, fashioned from reused plywood and exposed just during social occasions, shows the project’s ethos of small amounts and flexibility. In withstanding excess and prioritizing lived experience, Apartment # 2 emerges as a composed domestic environment where modernist restraint is enriched by ritual, craft, and personal history. Project Gallery Apartment or condo # 2/ OTLA 32 House # 2/ OTLA 33 © Suryan Saurabh, Lokesh Dang 
© Suryan Saurabh, Lokesh Dang< img width="682" height="1024"src="// www.w3.org/2000/svg'%20width='682'%20height='1024'%20viewBox='0%200%20682%201024'%3E%3C/svg%3E" alt= "Apartment # 2/ otla"data-src="https://www.architecturelab.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/KrishC_SND_3_-682x1024.jpg"/ > © Suryan Saurabh, Lokesh Dang © Suryan Saurabh, Lokesh Dang