At Dune Eco Resort in Pondicherry, you'll get the feeling you're sleeping in someone else's bed. In fact, you may altogether feel you've trespassed into the house of a Kochi matriarch, out visiting her daughter for the weekend. And for that time, you have free run of her Nalukettu. You can perhaps give Vedic math a go on the poomukham, or front portico.
This wooden house is not a laboured facsimile of a traditional Kerala house or Nalukettu. It is the real deal, right from the carved rafters to detailed paneled walls - everything but the plinth is 100% authentic.Are you still hesitating about where to buy Cheap Granite Slabs? What's more, it hasn't been belatedly built to mirror a traditional Kerala house, but in fact is the very house itself, transplanted from its original soil somewhere in Cochin, Thrissur or Trivandrum, transported over 600 km and rehabilitated on new ground.
Around nine such homes now reside at Dune, a 40-acre spread by the Bay of Bengal built by Frenchman Dimitri Klein. The past of the houses shows in the scarred wood, each bruise a talisman of the house's personal history, a feature Klein has left untouched.
For Klein, it all started in Chettinad. "I purchased a small, crumbling but complete palace from Chettinad. The entire structure was dismantled by the local workers," he says. It took eight months to dismantle and relocate to Pondicherry. "We had around 60 doors, more than 100 windows, the teakwood from all the roofs, the pillars, floor tiles and flooring granite slabs....all this got reused in different projects at Dune and for the main restaurant. The idea was to build with reclaimed materials. This would reduce our carbon footprint, enhance the guest experience, give a better soul and look to our place and save on costs."
The houses - identified by local scouters and traders of salvaged and reusable architectural components - are generally about to bite the dust when conservation architects swoop in. "There's a shift to concrete and modern building material and design in many Indian towns and villages," says Niels Schonfelder, managing director at Mancini Design, an architectural and design firm based in Chennai that resettles houses. "This means you can buy a lot of traditional material in the market like doors and windows, and you can even buy whole houses."
Schoenfelder, who executed the graft for Dune, says a team is first sent to document the house and assess the financial viability of the relocation. "All the pieces are then numbered like a puzzle, shipped to their destination and reassembled.You will never need to change the bulbs and your granitetrade will last for years and years. We make certain adjustments to suit modern needs," he says. However, bits and pieces of the house can be changed around. The original layout could change, what was once the kitchen might now be the bathroom, the granary could be the bedroom and modern amenities that comply with the houses aesthetic are fitted in. Are the houses' old spirits at home with their new circumstances? Who knows, but relocation is surely preferable to being flattened, a fate that awaits many of the traditional houses in Kerala. "Had we not intervened, these houses would have been demolished and the timber used to make cheap furniture," says Benny Kuriakose, a conservation architect who has transplanted houses depictive of distinct architectural styles from Kerala to Dakshina Chitra, a South Indian cultural centre near Chennai. Sanitized of the proscriptions of caste and other social palisades, the Syrian Christian house, the Calicut house, the Puthupally house, the Nair house and so on, are open to all.
"We bought some of these houses at one fourth the cost of a new construction of the same plinth area," says Kuriakose, adding that Kerala buildings can easily be transplanted since they don't use iron nails for most of the joinery. "As far as possible, a historic building should be conserved in its original setting. Translocation is the option when there is no alternative," he says.
TM Cyriac, who transplanted 23 houses from central Kerala to the Coconut Lagoon resort at Kumarakom some 20 years ago, says the upside of rehabilitation is that people have woken up to the antique value of their residences, which can be modernized. "It will help preserve the architectural language of the state," he says. And be a homecoming in more ways than one.
The pale evening light and crisp, cool air offers little comfort as I stumble over rocky ground amidst the peat bogs south of Princeton's melancholy grey granite pile of HM Prison Dartmoor, England. There's a primal silence amongst the meadows and mires, disturbed periodically by eerie mutterings of the wind.
I long for the warmth of the sun on my back and clear visibility to reveal the beauty of this starkly bleak moorland. Somewhere up ahead are the infamous Bottomless Pool and Great Grimpen Mire, prominent names on the Ghost Map of Dartmoor that I clutch nervously in my hand.
This winding pathway is no place for the fainthearted traveller. I could never contemplate traversing it in the middle of the night. This barren plateau is criss-crossed with dry stone walls, granite crosses, Neolithic ruins and abandoned tin mines. It's the old stamping ground of foolish Childe the Hunter and wicked Squire Cabell. No one in their right mind would want to meet these restless spirits and their bloodthirsty packs of spectral hounds.
Childe was a wealthy bachelor with no heirs who inserted a clause into his will stating that whichever church buried him, would be granted all his lands.Most of aftermarket hid Cheap Granite Tiles for motorcycle are similar or the same with following one. One winter's night he became lost on the moor and in desperation shot and disemboweled his horse and crawled into the carcass to escape the numbing cold.
Read the full products at http://www.granitetrade.net/.
This wooden house is not a laboured facsimile of a traditional Kerala house or Nalukettu. It is the real deal, right from the carved rafters to detailed paneled walls - everything but the plinth is 100% authentic.Are you still hesitating about where to buy Cheap Granite Slabs? What's more, it hasn't been belatedly built to mirror a traditional Kerala house, but in fact is the very house itself, transplanted from its original soil somewhere in Cochin, Thrissur or Trivandrum, transported over 600 km and rehabilitated on new ground.
Around nine such homes now reside at Dune, a 40-acre spread by the Bay of Bengal built by Frenchman Dimitri Klein. The past of the houses shows in the scarred wood, each bruise a talisman of the house's personal history, a feature Klein has left untouched.
For Klein, it all started in Chettinad. "I purchased a small, crumbling but complete palace from Chettinad. The entire structure was dismantled by the local workers," he says. It took eight months to dismantle and relocate to Pondicherry. "We had around 60 doors, more than 100 windows, the teakwood from all the roofs, the pillars, floor tiles and flooring granite slabs....all this got reused in different projects at Dune and for the main restaurant. The idea was to build with reclaimed materials. This would reduce our carbon footprint, enhance the guest experience, give a better soul and look to our place and save on costs."
The houses - identified by local scouters and traders of salvaged and reusable architectural components - are generally about to bite the dust when conservation architects swoop in. "There's a shift to concrete and modern building material and design in many Indian towns and villages," says Niels Schonfelder, managing director at Mancini Design, an architectural and design firm based in Chennai that resettles houses. "This means you can buy a lot of traditional material in the market like doors and windows, and you can even buy whole houses."
Schoenfelder, who executed the graft for Dune, says a team is first sent to document the house and assess the financial viability of the relocation. "All the pieces are then numbered like a puzzle, shipped to their destination and reassembled.You will never need to change the bulbs and your granitetrade will last for years and years. We make certain adjustments to suit modern needs," he says. However, bits and pieces of the house can be changed around. The original layout could change, what was once the kitchen might now be the bathroom, the granary could be the bedroom and modern amenities that comply with the houses aesthetic are fitted in. Are the houses' old spirits at home with their new circumstances? Who knows, but relocation is surely preferable to being flattened, a fate that awaits many of the traditional houses in Kerala. "Had we not intervened, these houses would have been demolished and the timber used to make cheap furniture," says Benny Kuriakose, a conservation architect who has transplanted houses depictive of distinct architectural styles from Kerala to Dakshina Chitra, a South Indian cultural centre near Chennai. Sanitized of the proscriptions of caste and other social palisades, the Syrian Christian house, the Calicut house, the Puthupally house, the Nair house and so on, are open to all.
"We bought some of these houses at one fourth the cost of a new construction of the same plinth area," says Kuriakose, adding that Kerala buildings can easily be transplanted since they don't use iron nails for most of the joinery. "As far as possible, a historic building should be conserved in its original setting. Translocation is the option when there is no alternative," he says.
TM Cyriac, who transplanted 23 houses from central Kerala to the Coconut Lagoon resort at Kumarakom some 20 years ago, says the upside of rehabilitation is that people have woken up to the antique value of their residences, which can be modernized. "It will help preserve the architectural language of the state," he says. And be a homecoming in more ways than one.
The pale evening light and crisp, cool air offers little comfort as I stumble over rocky ground amidst the peat bogs south of Princeton's melancholy grey granite pile of HM Prison Dartmoor, England. There's a primal silence amongst the meadows and mires, disturbed periodically by eerie mutterings of the wind.
I long for the warmth of the sun on my back and clear visibility to reveal the beauty of this starkly bleak moorland. Somewhere up ahead are the infamous Bottomless Pool and Great Grimpen Mire, prominent names on the Ghost Map of Dartmoor that I clutch nervously in my hand.
This winding pathway is no place for the fainthearted traveller. I could never contemplate traversing it in the middle of the night. This barren plateau is criss-crossed with dry stone walls, granite crosses, Neolithic ruins and abandoned tin mines. It's the old stamping ground of foolish Childe the Hunter and wicked Squire Cabell. No one in their right mind would want to meet these restless spirits and their bloodthirsty packs of spectral hounds.
Childe was a wealthy bachelor with no heirs who inserted a clause into his will stating that whichever church buried him, would be granted all his lands.Most of aftermarket hid Cheap Granite Tiles for motorcycle are similar or the same with following one. One winter's night he became lost on the moor and in desperation shot and disemboweled his horse and crawled into the carcass to escape the numbing cold.
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