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There is a kind of luxury that announces itself with marble and gold. The Terracotta Sanctuary is the other kind — the kind you feel in your shoulders dropping the moment you walk in.
It is a holiday home in a gated community on the quiet, green outskirts of Kochi, made for a young family of three who live in the United States. When they come home to Kerala, they come home to this: exposed brick, lime-plastered walls, reclaimed timber, and the dense tropical landscape pressing up against every window.
The brief was simple, and difficult. Design a house that feels inseparable from its landscape — one where the line between outside and inside blurs, and nature moves through every room.
The architecture made that possible. The house was envisioned by the builders Anugraha Srishti, whose commitment to sustainable, eco-conscious building gave the home its bones: honest brick, left exposed, as a living tribute to one of the oldest materials there is. Our work was to furnish it without betraying that honesty.
Every material inside the house was chosen to echo the organic beauty of the land around it. Earthy tones and raw textures recur throughout, so that the rooms constantly remind the people in them that they belong to something larger than the house itself. The effect is a home that feels grounded and alive rather than decorated.
The furniture is a considered mix of locally sourced antiques and new pieces built from responsibly sourced teak by the artisans in Temple Town's own workshop. Old doors and windows from Kerala homes have been given new lives. Nothing is there for novelty; everything carries weight, either of history or of craft.
On the ground floor, the master bedroom is a study in calm and quiet luxury. Against white lime-plastered walls stands an imposing four-poster bed made from reclaimed wood — less a piece of furniture than a sculpture.
The bedside tables are repurposed Kerala treasure chests, which bring history and a certain gravity to either side of the bed. An old window, once part of a heritage home, now serves as the mirror. The palette is simply white and wood, softened by hand-printed quilts that keep the room artisanal rather than austere. It is a room designed for deep, uninterrupted rest.
If the master bedroom is subdued elegance, the guest room on the first floor is the opposite by design — a vibrant, sensory space that honours the cultural richness of India and gives visitors an experience of their own.
The bed is anchored by a headboard made from an antique wooden gate from Jodhpur. The bedside tables are cane and teak. Two glass pendant lights hang beside the bed, and wooden rafters with carved side brackets overhead bring warmth and depth to the ceiling. A Rajasthani gate, Kerala cane and teak, and European glass pendants share one room and read as one idea.
The first floor is given over to leisure: an entertainment lounge with a well-stocked bar, a pool table, and a classic Steinway piano that gives the room its gravitas. It is where the house becomes a gathering place when family and friends arrive for the holidays.
Homes built on trends date the moment the trend moves on. The Terracotta Sanctuary will not, because nothing in it is fashionable. Brick, lime, teak, cane, antique timber and handwork do not go out of style; they simply age, and age well.
That is what we mean by real Indian luxury. Not imported polish, but materials and craft of the highest quality, used honestly, in a home designed to feel as good in thirty years as it does on the first morning of the first holiday.
Temple Town's clients are, for the most part, C-suite leaders of billion-dollar companies and business owners who have truly made it. They could build a holiday home anywhere in the world, in any style. What brings them to us is an eye for the finer things — the ability to recognise real craft and real culture, and the confidence to choose restraint over display.
For a family who spend most of the year far away, the Terracotta Sanctuary is more than a second home. It is where their child will learn what Kerala feels like — the smell of rain on brick, the cool of a lime-plastered wall in the afternoon, the weight of an old teak chest. That is an inheritance too.
The Terracotta Sanctuary was designed and furnished by Temple Town, the interior design studio and furniture maker founded by Meera Pyarelal in Thrissur, Kerala, in 1999, working in the Heirloom Modernism idiom.
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