Selected Works / 06
Greenshire 2214
Our Own Nest, Twenty-two Floors Up
A developer’s grey shell on the twenty-second floor, bought half-finished and drawn over for a year, with the architect’s wife as the steadiest and most difficult client he has had.
The apartment came as most do: three bedrooms, a corridor, a living room walled off from a kitchen, every partition placed for the builder’s convenience and none for the light. The plan was not enlarged and not gutted. It was re-read. The rooms that had to stay solid stayed solid; everything between them was opened, so that living, dining, study and kitchen became one spine of connected rooms rather than four boxes off a passage.
The spine is held by three materials that do the dividing without closing anything: a teak portal that stands free of the ceiling and marks the threshold into the living room, black steel and glass screens that let the study and the kitchen be seen and shut, and a wall of terracotta tile that takes the evening light along the whole length of the plan. The finished home is on this page, but so is the shell it began as and the plan drawn full size on its floor, because the two are the same project.
It is the studio’s own address, and the students from SPA Delhi who come through it sit on the same sofa the drawings were argued over.
The shell
What was bought: a grey RCC shell twenty-two floors up, climbed on foot more often than not while the lift was still unreliable. Nothing structural was ever moved.
The portal and the wall
A teak box at the heart of the plan, standing free of the ceiling, and a wall of terracotta tile. Both went in before anything else, because everything else was set out from them.
The spine
Living, dining, study and kitchen in one line. The screens are black steel and glass, so the study is seen from the sofa and shut when it has to be.
Wet rooms and the sofa
The set the apartment was fitted out from. The unit plan and the flooring plan at 1:50; the kitchen and the casework at 1:25 and 1:20. Titleblocks removed; each sheet carries its own graphic scale.
“We never moved a single structural wall. We taught the space to hold people, and to frame the sky.”
Shrutiniwas Sharma- Location
- Greenshire, Mahagun Meadows, Greater Noida
- Date
- Bought 2023; fitted out 2024 – 2025
- Typology
- Apartment, twenty-second floor. The studio’s own home
- Client
- Anumeha Singh, and the architect
- Structure
- Developer’s RCC shell. No structural wall was moved
- Partitions
- Teak portal, black steel and glass screens, terracotta tile wall
- Floors
- Oak herringbone; encaustic tile in the wet rooms
- Photography
- The studio
- Architect
- STUDIO Shrutiniwas
- Principal architect
- Shrutiniwas Sharma