Through an earth-sheltered home in rural India, the founder of Bengaluru-based studio Taliesyn Design, G.S. Mahaboob Basha, makes a case for modulated light over spectacle
The site came first. Before the drawings, before the brief had fully settled, Taliesyn Design & Architecture was reading contour maps. The land had a logic of its own; a topography that sloped and dipped in ways that most architects would treat as a constraint to be overcome. Basha decided to treat it as a collaborator. The building would not sit on this site. It would settle into it.
This is where House of Manduva begins: not with a form, but with a decision; the decision to submerge.
Earth-sheltered architecture is an ancient idea that contemporary practice has largely set aside in favour of transparency, exposure, and the kind of glass-fronted maximalism that photographs well and often performs poorly. Basha and Chandrashekar, who co-founded Taliesyn in 2010 with a simple premise of building for the land, not against it, have moved in the opposite direction. Fifteen years on, that premise has produced one of South India’s most consistently published bodies of work, featured across Dezeen, Architectural Digest, Wallpaper, and ArchDaily. What distinguishes the studio is not a signature form. It is a method.
The Light Problem
To choose earth-sheltering is to choose a fight with light. The ground insulates; it also occludes. Go too deep without resolution, and you are designing a cave, a space that is thermally excellent and psychologically difficult. The question Basha had to answer at Manduva House was not a decorative one. It was structural: how do you bring light into a building that the earth is actively keeping out?
The answer, when it came, was singular. One skylight, precisely positioned over the living area, became the building’s primary spatial event.
This is worth pausing on, because the instinct in most architecture of this scale would be to solve the light problem through multiplication: more openings, more glass, more surface area exposed to sky. Basha went the other way; one opening, one considered incision in the plane above. The restraint is not aesthetic minimalism for its own sake. It is the result of a philosophy about what light is actually for.
“We imagine materials as surfaces that will be read over time,” Basha explains. “Light becomes the medium through which this reading happens. Openings are positioned to allow light to move slowly across different surfaces and textures, revealing their depth, irregularities, and even their ageing.”
The keyword is slowly. What Basha is describing is not illumination. It is a duration.
The Skylight as Event
The structure of Manduva House uses cast-in-place construction, concrete poured on site, not prefabricated, which means every surface carries the evidence of its own making. No two sections of the wall are identical. There are irregularities in the pour, variations in texture, the faint record of formwork and human hands. In most buildings, these inconsistencies are treated as problems to be concealed. Here, they are the point.
As the sun moves through the day, the skylight traces that movement across the interior. It finds the inconsistencies. It catches the fissures. It reads the wall the way a careful reader reads a page, slowly, with attention to texture. “The surface begins to register time through shifting light,” Basha says, “making it less of a fixed element and more of a continuous narrative.”
To live in this house is to live with a light that is never the same twice. The morning quality is different from the afternoon. The wall you looked at yesterday is not the wall you are looking at today, not because anything has changed, but because the light that reveals it has moved. This is what Basha means by architecture as a surface that is read over time. The building is not finished when the contractor leaves. It goes on being made, daily, by the light moving through it.
Shadow, in this context, is not the absence of something. It is an active spatial material. Subtle drops in floor level and shifts in ceiling height create gradients within the open plan; zones that move from bright to dim without a wall being built. “A slightly darker corner, a partially shaded niche,” Basha notes, “can offer a sense of retreat within an otherwise open plan. These variations allow spaces to feel intimate without losing their continuity.”
Against Spectacle
Here is where Basha’s position becomes, quietly, an argument.
Contemporary luxury residential architecture, particularly in India, where global aspiration has long been measured in glass and exposure has tended to treat light as spectacle. More of it is better. The floor-to-ceiling window is a status object. The building that reveals its openness makes a claim about the people who live inside it. This is a European formal inheritance: the glass house, the open plan, the maximum transparency that the Nordic light demanded and that the Indian climate makes it genuinely uncomfortable.
Basha calls his alternative “tempered light.” At Manduva House, deep verandahs and recessed openings act as buffers, gradations between outside and inside that allow light to arrive slowly rather than flood in. Not avoidance. Negotiation. The light is still present; it is simply being asked to slow down.
The distinction matters because it redefines what comfort means. In the European glass-box tradition, comfort is maximum brightness, maximum connection to the outside, maximum visual freedom. In Basha’s tradition, rooted in the Indian vernacular, in buildings that were always responding to heat, dust, and the particular quality of the subcontinent’s light, comfort is calibrated. It is the relief of a shaded threshold after the glare of the sun. The pleasure of a dim interior that makes the courtyard brighter by contrast.
“The experience of light is often intensified through contrast,” Basha says. “When light is allowed to enter selectively, it creates moments of focus and pause.” This is not a philosophy of deprivation. It is a philosophy of attention, one that insists you feel the light rather than simply see it.
The Slow Building
Return, at the end, to the skylight moving across cast concrete. To the surface that is different every hour.
Basha’s deepest conviction about architecture, that it is a continuous narrative rather than a fixed object, is most fully realised here, in a building that the earth holds, that the sun reads, that time makes each day differently. It is not a spectacular building in any conventional sense. It does not announce itself. It does not compete.
What it does is accumulate. Every day that passes adds to the record of light on its walls. Every season shifts the angle, changes the shadow, and reveals something the previous month obscured. The building is, in this sense, never complete. It is always in the act of being read. Whether this constitutes a new definition of Indian luxury, or more precisely, a recovery of an older one, is not a question Basha is particularly interested in answering. The building answers itself, slowly, across the hours of the day.
