From afar, you could almost miss Kadangotu House near Kannur. Its terracotta roofs peek through coconut palms and jackfruit trees, with paddy fields stretching beyond the thick green foliage.

Walk inside, and one of the first things you notice is the air. A breeze from the neighbouring fields moves through the rooms, even when Kerala’s humidity climbs above 80 percent.

That feeling of openness was built into the house from the beginning.

Sisters Renu Krishnadas and Rekha Utham wanted to build on a 70-cent ancestral plot in a village about an hour and a half from Kannur city. Renu has lived in Dubai for the past 40 years and works in finance, while Rekha works in Bahrain.

When they returned to this piece of family land to build a home together, they wanted to hold on to what already made the place feel like theirs: its trees, red earth, heavy monsoon rain and the breeze moving in from the paddy fields.

Architect Amrutha Kishor, chief architect at Elemental, began from that idea. Instead of designing a house first and then finding ways to cool it, she looked at how the site itself could do some of that work.

The result was a home with laterite walls, clay roofs, high ceilings and carefully positioned openings, all designed to help it stay comfortable with far less dependence on air conditioning.

Renu was among the first to wonder whether that would actually work.

A 21-day stay at the completed house gave her the answer.

Before the rooms came the wind

For Amrutha, the starting point was simple: understand the climate before drawing the floor plan.

“We are specialists in climate-responsive design,” she says. “With any project we do, we make it a point to ensure that it responds to the environment. We don’t create spaces that automatically get heated up, so that we then need to spend electricity cooling them.”

That meant first figuring out “where the wind is coming from”, because, she says, “only then will the cross-ventilation system work”.

Stand inside Kadangotu House, and the logic becomes easier to understand. Breeze from the adjacent paddy fields enters through lower openings and travels through the rooms. As the air inside gets warmer, it rises towards the high ceilings and escapes through taller windows.

Architects call this the stack effect. For the people living there, it simply means the air keeps moving instead of getting trapped indoors.

That natural circulation became one of the most important parts of the house. It also asked the family to trust design choices that did not always look convincing at first.

‘This is not going to last’

The jali (perforated lattice) walls were one such choice.

Namita, Rekha’s daughter, remembers seeing the openings in........

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