For Grandmother. For Memory. For Everything In Between.

Some projects arrive as briefs. This one arrived as a feeling.

When Mr, Rahul Dholakiya came to us, he carried a simple and deeply human wish — to build something in the name of his late grandmother Santok Baa. A space that could bring back her warmth. A place where his family could step away from the chaos of everyday life and feel, even briefly, the love of someone they had lost. That was his vision. Our job was to find the architecture within it.

We found it in the earth.

A Landscape That Remembers

Spread across five acres dense with chickoo trees, the land already held the memory halfway. We didn't fight it — we listened. The design emerged as a series of intimate spaces tucked beneath the canopy, each shaped by the earth itself. Mud walls mixed with cow dung in the old Gujarati way. Bamboo sourced locally and laid into roofs by patient, skilled hands. Terracotta underfoot. A carved lace border running along every roofline — not decoration, but memory made material.

Every craftsman came from Dhudhala itself — the family's native village. They knew the techniques because their fathers had used them. This was not a revival. It was a return.

The exterior walls carry hand-painted murals in traditional Gujarati folk art — processions of figures, cattle, peacocks, trees in full leaf. Beneath them, a band of white-on-terracotta pattern runs like a border on a grandmother's saree. Continuous, gentle, and deeply felt.

The Pavilion: Where Time Slows

At the heart of the farm sits an open pavilion — bamboo ceiling, stone columns, a raised terracotta platform that becomes a stage for everything that matters. A wooden swing hangs from the rafters. A woman grinds grain the way her own grandmother once did. Children ride down the path. Calves wander freely. At dusk, when the fire is lit and smoke curls upward, the pavilion looks as if it has always been here — as if it grew from the soil the same way the chickoo trees did.

A Living Ecosystem

A fully functional kitchen farm grows vegetables and grains in careful rows, the produce going directly to the Dholakiya family's home in the city. For the children, this is where learning happens without feeling like learning — hands in the earth, understanding where food comes from. A Gir cattle house completes the ecosystem, carrying within it a way of life that deserves to be passed on.

This project reminded us, quietly and completely, why we do what we do.

We do not design spaces. We design feelings. સંતોક બા ની વાટિકા was built from mud, bamboo, and craft. It was built from memory. And in the end, it became something rarer than architecture — a gift, given by a grandson to the grandmother who raised him right.

PROJECT DETAILS

Location: Surat, Gujarat.
Typology: Heritage Farmstead
Client: Mr. Rahul Dholakiya
Design Team: Studio Dot Dimension
Completion: 2025
Photography: Tarun Hirpara