Farmhouse Interior Design Services

Specifying for a closed house

Pests, damp and the things that arrive

1. Termite treatment, pre-construction and annual. A soil treatment at construction and a contract for annual inspection. In a rural or semi-rural plot this is not optional, and timber joinery without it is a two-year investment.
2. Rodent exclusion is a detailing job. Seal every service penetration with steel wool and mortar, not foam. Mesh every vent, every gap at the eaves and the gap under every external door. A rodent in a closed house for three weeks does a remarkable amount of damage.
3. Insect mesh on every opening, on a frame that can be opened for cleaning. The house will be aired when you arrive, and you will want the windows open without the wildlife.
4. Snakes and the perimeter. Keep planting 600 mm clear of the external walls, avoid dense ground cover against the plinth, and seal the gap under every door.
5. Damp is the slow one. An unventilated house builds humidity for three weeks. Cross-ventilation designed into the plan, louvred vents that can be left open securely, and a dehumidifier on a timer where there is reliable power.
6. Water ingress goes unnoticed. A roof leak in a city home is found the same day; here it is found three weeks later. Overspecify the roof, and consider a simple water-leak sensor on a mobile alert.

Farmhouse

Empty for twenty-five days a month, and it has to survive that

Power and water

• Assume the supply fails. A grid connection in a rural or semi-rural location is intermittent, and a farmhouse with no backup is a farmhouse you cannot use in May.
• Solar with battery storage is now the sensible default rather than a statement. A 3–5 kW system with 5–10 kWh of storage costs ₹3.5–₹8 lakh and covers lights, fans, the pump, the refrigerator and the router indefinitely.
• A generator for the air conditioning if the house is used in summer, because solar sized for AC gets expensive quickly. A 7.5–15 kVA silent set is ₹2.5–₹6 lakh installed.
• Water source and storage. Borewell, tanker or a municipal line, with an underground sump of at least a full weekend’s use plus reserve, and an overhead tank for gravity feed.
• Test the water and treat it. Rural groundwater is frequently hard, saline or iron-bearing. A test costs ₹2,000 and decides whether you need softening, an iron filter or reverse osmosis — and it decides your tap and shower specification too, because hard water destroys chrome.
• Waste water. A septic tank and soak pit properly sized and positioned, or a small treatment plant. Position it downhill and away from the borewell, and design access for desludging.

Designing for arrival and departure

The experience of a weekend house is bookended by two twenty-minute rituals, and designing for them is what makes a house genuinely usable rather than a project you dread visiting.

The best farmhouse we ever built has a laminated card by the front door with nine things on it. The client says it is the most useful thing in the house.

Greenbox principal designer

Materials that suit the brief

• Stone, terracotta and kota floors. Cool underfoot, indifferent to humidity, improve with age and survive being unwashed for a month.
• Lime plaster and mineral paint. Breathable, which matters in a house that is closed for long periods, and they mark gracefully rather than badly.
• Solid or seasoned timber with an oil finish, not PU. An oiled surface can be refreshed locally after a damp season; a lacquered one that has blistered has to be stripped.
• Leather, canvas and jute over delicate upholstery. All three tolerate humidity and improve with wear.
• Stainless or powder-coated steel for anything outdoors, and galvanised for anything structural. Mild steel in a semi-rural plot with no one repainting it lasts three years.
• Simple, robust hardware. Nothing with an electronic component that has to survive three weeks of humidity, and nothing that cannot be replaced from a town twenty kilometres away.

Planning the house around how it is used

A weekend house is occupied differently from a home. Usually more people, all at once, for two days, and then nobody. That pattern should be in the plan.

• More beds than bedrooms. Weekend houses host. Two bedrooms and a family room that sleeps four more is often more useful than four bedrooms, and it is cheaper.
• One very large shared space. The point of these houses is everybody in one room. Make the living, dining and kitchen a single generous volume that opens outward.
• An outdoor kitchen or a barbecue point. It is used on every visit and it keeps the heat and the smell out of the house.
• A verandah deeper than you think. 2,400 mm minimum, and 3,000 if the budget allows. Below 2,000 mm a verandah is a corridor with a view rather than a room.
• A bathroom reachable from outside. Wet from the pool or the garden, nobody should be crossing the living room. One bathroom with an external door solves it.
• Storage for the things that stay. Games, books, sports equipment, spare bedding, tools. A weekend house accumulates, and without a store it accumulates on surfaces.

Related and local

For weekend homes within reach of Mumbai — Alibaug, Karjat, Lonavala and the Palghar coast — see farmhouse interior designers in Mumbai. For a permanently occupied standalone house, see villa interior design, which shares the structure but not the intermittency.

Selected work by Greenbox Design Studio. Tap any image to enlarge.