Our home will always be the place for which we feel the deepest affection, no matter where we are. Home is our ‘little world’ where we dream of getting condensed after a hard day at work.’ Home is the place where we desire to be after a long vacation, to be able to feel the warmth of the walls surrounding us. Home is a very important link between a man and his idea of safety. It is the envelope that represents privacy, comfort and stability in our lives. It is that one place of permanence and consistency where we can ‘slow’ down and shield ourselves from the onslaught of a fast, chaotic world.
A man starts to fantasize about his ‘dream home’ from his childhood. Be it the candy covered “Gingerbread house’’ from Hansel and Gretel, dark and scary “Castle Dracula”, peculiar, funny looking Hobbit houses from The Lord of the Rings or the futuristic tenements from Star Wars, we always refer to some very surreal, outlandish and never-seen-before examples for our ‘future homes’. We create enchanting sand castles, sketch out fascinating built forms and dream of fairy tale-esque magical setting for our homes. We build our dream homes in the sky, inside the ground, on the trees, cliffs, besides the sea and what not. But as we grow up, our thought process towards our ‘dream home’ takes a practical turn that is limited by modern world trends, materiality, context and laws. We keep our imaginations aside and tend to follow the usual set of codes and principles required to create a house. We create spatial utopia with brick and mortar but fail to treat our home as another character that has feelings of its own. We talk about homes in very rigid terms like facia, form, weight while we tend to forget about its soft and intangible aspects like warmth and positivity. We move away from the 'surrealism' of a home to the 'realism' of a house. As designers, we must approach the problem with a fresh narrative and explore the idea of designing our homes with the highest level of imagination.
