NYAY, Villa 105

The neighbour is a cream three-storey with red-tile bay caps, the default this studio defines itself against. The house answers it with its own mass rather than a screen: a wedge that blocks the sightline from the garden and the principal rooms, gives a corner plot one legible silhouette instead of a stack of floors, and turns the tallest elevation into the most photogenic one.

A blocking mass is only as good as what it offers in exchange for the view it takes. So the garden sits on a raised plane, and the section does the rest: stepping floor levels, a hexagonal column holding a forty-five degree cut at the side veranda, and tapering RCC beams that are the wedge rather than decorate it.

Inside, one formal drawing room downstairs and one family living above; a ground-floor suite for the grandparents, family bedrooms and living on the first, guest and service on the second with their own terraces, and a spiral service stair and lift threading the full height. The house is named for the child. His bedroom is the smallest of the four.