Quiet Minimal 
There is a large mahogany tree at the rear of a suburban block that most developers would have removed without a second thought. Vish and Gaurav Rajadhyax, co-founders of R ARCHITECTURE, own this block — and the tree became the central axis of their own home. Every room orients toward it. The courtyard that separates the two living pods frames it. Even the roofline angles seem to bow in its direction.
The result is a house that feels genuinely rooted in its place, not dropped onto it. Terracotta shingles wrap both walls and roof in a single warm skin, the colour echoing the bark and the mulched earth below. Step back far enough and the building looks like it grew here too.
The Project
In A Park is a residential project designed and owner-built by R ARCHITECTURE for the firm’s own co-founders. The brief was specific: create a comfortable, multi-generational home on an efficient floorplate, preserve three significant trees on the site, and do it all with Passivhaus-level energy performance. Those are constraints that could produce something rigid and compromised. Here they produced the opposite.
The plan separates the home into two pods connected by an entry lounge. The double-storey main living pod sits to the west. A single-storey grandparents’ pod — complete with two bedrooms, a bathroom, a lounge, and a kitchenette — sits to the east. Between them, a north-facing courtyard with a swimming pool acts as the social and visual centre of the house. Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) make the envelope airtight, keeping energy loads low without sacrificing the generous glazing that connects every room to the courtyard and its tree.
The Spaces
The Exterior Skin
The material decision that defines In A Park from the street is the terracotta shingle cladding, a locally made product ordinarily reserved for roofing. R ARCHITECTURE applied it continuously across both walls and roof, erasing the conventional line between the two. Up close, the hand-laid texture of the shingles is evident — each one slightly irregular, warm-toned, almost geological. Against the green of the site trees and the deep charcoal of the black vertical-batten fence and arched garage panel, the terracotta reads as something earthy and deliberate rather than decorative.
The Rear Courtyard and Pool
From the rear garden, the two pods frame a narrow corridor of space that opens to reveal the swimming pool and its timber deck. The mahogany tree rises above the back fence, its canopy reflected in the still blue water. The terracotta walls of both pods run parallel on either side, sliding glass doors punctuating each face so that the courtyard is never truly separate from the rooms that surround it. A timber table and chairs sit at the far end of the deck, positioned to face back toward the house and tree simultaneously.
The Entry Lounge — Blue Room
The entry lounge is the hinge between the two pods, and it announces the interior palette with considerable confidence. All four walls, including the ceiling, are painted a deep teal-blue that reads almost like the inside of a shadowed pool. Grey large-format floor tiles ground the space. A rattan-and-timber day sofa upholstered in salmon-pink suede sits against the far wall, dressed with emerald green velvet cushions. Behind it, nine ceramic face plates — a mix of terracotta and white, each with a hand-incised expression — are arranged in a three-by-three grid. A trailing pothos plant spills through a white opening to the right, connecting this saturated room to the lighter corridor beyond.
The Entry Lounge — Pool View
Seen from the other direction, the same blue room opens directly to the courtyard pool through a full-height glazed door flanked by a perforated terracotta-tile screen. Through the screen and glass, the pool terrace and the mahogany tree are visible, the warm shingle cladding of the opposite pod framing the view. A leather-upholstered bench stool sits in the centre of the room on the grey tile floor. A rattan-doored timber sideboard holds a brass mushroom lamp and a small ceramic vessel; a round brass-framed mirror hangs above it. The owners’ indoor plants, a fiddle-leaf fig and several broad-leaf varieties, occupy corners and edges.
The Entry Lounge — Light and Reflection
At certain times of day, the pool casts moving water reflections across the deep-blue walls and ceiling of the entry lounge. The effect is less designed than discovered — a consequence of orienting the room directly toward the north-facing pool. The rattan sideboard, the leather bench, and a potted monstera are all caught in the shifting light. The terracotta door panel to the left glows amber against the blue, a material echo of the exterior cladding brought inside as a door facing.
The Entry Corridor
The corridor connecting the entry lounge to the main living pod is tall and white, a deliberate decompression after the saturated blue of the entry room. A mature pothos trails from a high-mounted planter, its vines cascading two metres down the white wall. To the right, a louvred glass door set into a deep teal reveal looks directly onto the courtyard pool — a framed surprise view that the designers describe as one of the key spatial moves of the plan. Ahead, the corridor leads to the warmer, timber-ceilinged living space, visible at the end as a soft amber glow.
The Main Living Room — Toward the Garden
The main living space is anchored by a plywood ceiling — pale, linear, and warm — that runs the full width of the room and wraps the space in a quality of light distinct from any painted surface. A concrete-rendered media wall holds the television and an integrated open bookshelf lined with small glass vessels, ceramic objects, and trailing plants. In front of it, a tan leather sofa faces a Noguchi-style glass-and-walnut coffee table. To one side, an Eames lounge chair and ottoman in rosewood and black leather sit close to the full-height sliding glass doors, which open to the rear deck and the mahogany tree beyond. Sheer white curtains diffuse the garden light across the polished tile floor.
The Main Living Room — Full Width
The wider view of the living room reveals its full depth and the balance R ARCHITECTURE struck between warmth and restraint. The plywood ceiling extends from wall to wall, unbroken except for four small black ceiling speakers. On the left wall, a black upright piano sits below a floor lamp, adding a domestic informality that prevents the space from tipping into showroom territory. The leather sofa, concrete wall, glass table, and polished floor work together as a palette of materials with broadly similar tonal values — warm grey, tan, pale gold — so the eye settles rather than bounces. The sliding doors frame the mahogany tree as a living artwork, the rain chain hanging in the foreground like punctuation.
What you might carry home
The most direct thing this project demonstrates is that an existing tree is not a problem to engineer around — it can be the thing your whole plan orbits. If your block has a mature tree you have been treating as a constraint, consider whether removing it is actually the loss. Designing toward it, even just orienting a main window or a seating area to face it, changes the quality of daily life in a room in ways that no finish or fixture can replicate.
The terracotta shingle detail is worth sitting with, too. The insight is not that you should clad your house in terracotta, but that a material associated with one application — roofing, in this case — can cross over to become a wall finish, an interior door facing, a column wrap. Before you default to a cladding category, ask whether there is a material already in your palette that could do more than one job. That kind of repetition is what makes a home feel considered rather than assembled from a catalogue.
The entry lounge in deep teal-blue is a useful permission slip for anyone who has wanted to commit to a bold colour but defaulted to a safer accent wall. Here the colour covers all four walls and the ceiling, which is precisely why it works — it becomes a room with a specific atmosphere rather than a room with a coloured wall. The commitment is the point. If you are going to do it, close the box.
Finally, the grandparents’ pod model is worth noting for anyone thinking about multi-generational living. It is not a granny flat bolted onto the back of the house as an afterthought. It is a full pod — lounge, kitchenette, bedrooms, bathroom — connected to the main house through the shared courtyard, which means togetherness is a choice made moment to moment rather than enforced by layout. If you are planning for ageing parents or returning adult children, the courtyard-as-connector idea keeps both parties genuinely independent without putting a fence between them.
In A Park is the kind of project that happens when designers build for themselves — not as an exercise in self-expression, but as a chance to live out every conviction about what a suburban home can be. Three trees still stand. Three generations share a courtyard. The bills are low and the rooms are full of plants. That is a pretty good brief, and an even better result.
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The tree that shaped the whole plan
