[Print] House Around the Sapodilla Trees
Between them, architects Sönke Hoof and Khushnu Panthaki Hoof have an uncanny gift for noticing the almost invisible—that fleeting detail, or lack thereof, that others might overlook. Yet on a summer’s day not so many years ago, as they left the golden clamour of Ahmedabad for the languid green of its hinterland, they arrived at a site that appeared to offer almost nothing at all. Like many such plots on the city’s outskirts—some 30 to 40 minutes away, beyond the tightening grip of urban density—the land held no preordained landmark, no obliging ruin, no obvious architectural cue. What it did hold was a tumbledown one-room cottage, once a weekend getaway, which went largely unnoticed. And, at the centre, two old sapodilla trees, which decidedly did not. ‘The trees immediately anchored the place,’ recalls Panthaki Hoof, one half of the Ahmedabad-based Studio Sangath, which she leads with Hoof. ‘Everything else felt negotiable.’
