Someplace, Manali

The first visit to the site was during the winter with three feet of snow. It was our first project in this climate. We spent a few months preparing the designs and trying to understand the challenges of designing in the extreme climate. Right from day one, we knew that we had to use the boulders on-site to create the building blocks for the design. Intuition fine-tuned with our past experiences guided us to using stone. Intuition followed by reason led us to the design.

The site is situated in a valley surrounded by snow peaks in a one-acre plot of an apple orchard. So from the first moment on, we knew we had to build small buildings dispersed in the small clearings we could find on the site. That did a couple of things, first, we did not have to remove any of the mature apple trees, and secondly, all the spaces had a greater sense of privacy.