location
Coorg, India
Services Involved
Interior Design / Decor & Styling / Furniture Design
the job in a nutshell
To design a home overlooking a river in the thick of a coffee estate in Coorg.
The name Java Mane means “coffee house” in Kannada, and it suits the project perfectly. This home is shaped by coffee country: by its climate, its red earth, its long monsoon, its distance from the city, and the slower domestic rhythms that come with being on an estate.
Our clients have two grown daughters, and they wanted a second home that may one day become their retirement retreat. For the wife, who comes from Coorg, the project was especially personal. JavaMane was not merely a holiday house in the hills, but a home on her own land, in the place she still thinks of as home. For her husband, a retired tech entrepreneur, golfer and former snooker champion, it offered a different kind of promise: a place to gather friends, step away from the city, and live by a more generous clock.
The property itself is striking: five acres of coffee plantation on a steep slope, with dense vegetation and the river below. Yet the project began with a small misunderstanding.
At the time Studio Slip came on board, a local architect, Deepak, was already on board. He was familiar with Coorg’s climate, terrain and building traditions. His architectural approach was rooted in the region: sloping tiled roofs to withstand the monsoon, deep verandahs to protect one from the rain, and covered thresholds that kept the outdoors close without letting the weather take over. Studio Slip’s role was to carry that architectural language into the interiors and make the house work for the way the family would actually live.
There was one immediate challenge. What had begun in the client’s mind as a small, sweet cottage had grown into a 7,000-square-foot, two-storey estate home. The cottage had, almost without anyone noticing, become a manor. The design task was to bring the scale back to human terms - to make the rooms feel warm, useful and personal, not merely large.
Here is how we made a few changes: In the guest room, inserting a wall gave the room a better sense of enclosure and created space for a walk-in wardrobe. In the bathrooms, solid partitions replaced glass, making large rooms feel more private and better proportioned. A traditional bath and spa are lovely in theory but less useful in practice, so we converted it into a TV room, a storeroom, and a powder room. Even the ground-floor guest room was thought through with the future in mind: if stairs become difficult later, it can easily work as the main bedroom.
The brief also had two very different sensibilities running through it. Our clients' tastes are drawn to tropical modernism and to the easy movement between indoors and outdoors that Geoffrey Bawa’s work captures so well. But she did not want the house to feel spare or severe. She wanted colour, pattern, texture and warmth. Jawad’s taste was quieter, but he was generous about letting Chhaya lead the direction of the home. His own requests were clear and specific: a well-designed bar, enough storage, and a snooker room that acknowledged a passion he had carried for years.
That balance gives the house much of its character. Chhaya’s art room is one of its most personal spaces: intimate and quiet, with a balcony that looks out across the valley and the estate. Her own artwork appears throughout the home, giving the interiors a sense of authorship and emotional depth that no decorative layer could replicate. Jawad’s snooker room has a very different mood - darker, woodier, more enclosed - and is encountered near the entrance, before the full scale of the house reveals itself.
Meanwhile, the bar became one of the project's strongest gestures. It began as a functional requirement and was reworked late in the process by a young designer on the Studio Slip team. The result is a piece that does more than serve drinks. It holds a key position between the living spaces and the outdoors, between the family’s private life and their larger circle of guests. In a house designed for gathering, it naturally becomes a place where people pause, lean, talk and stay longer than intended.
The main living, dining and bar area forms the centre of the home. Here, Studio Slip chose not to over-divide. Chhaya wanted cosy corners throughout the house, and many emerged through furniture placement, colour, lighting and scale. But this central volume needed openness. It had to hold the landscape, the movement of guests, the drama of the roof and the view beyond. Its warmth comes not from being enclosed, but from the way materials, furniture and light soften its size.
The palette changed considerably over the course of the project. Early references leaned towards restraint: Studio Slip’s Banyan home, which Chhaya had admired, and the disciplined tropical modernism of Bawa. The first renders were spare, almost spa-like. But as the work progressed, Chhaya’s instinct for colour came through more strongly - in tiles, fabrics, reference images and on-site decisions. The house grew less minimal and more layered. It gained a pattern, softness, and a certain playfulness that feels closer to the client herself.
The project has been so sustainability positive, as the project's location affected how we executed it. A second home in a remote hill setting is never just a matter of design intent. Coorg has a severe monsoon that dictates its own terms. Roads turned to mud, trucks stalled, and delivery windows depended as much on the weather as on the tight schedule. The Slip team needed to execute the house design plans on the site. It had to be shaped around what we could source nearby, and brought up the hill. So we sourced everything locally. It had to be worked on by local hands and trusted to withstand the climate. The site’s limitations did not weaken our design; they gave it a more rooted material life.
Java Mane is a house that can change scale. When full of family and friends, it expands easily - with meals, games, conversation, late evenings near the bar and the cheerful mess of a house used well. When all is quiet, it offers smaller pleasures: tea on the verandah, breakfast in an outdoor corner, a book in the morning light, an afternoon sleep after a walk through the estate. It has all the practical comforts of a city home - storage, power backup, internet, proper kitchens.
By evening, when the air cools, and the fire pit near the bar begins to glow, the house feels closest to its purpose. It has a much lived-in, generous and magnanimous feel to it: a home shaped by Chhaya and Jawad’s personality and ease, Studio Slip’s layered approach, and the abundance of everything that is Coorg.
Java Mane brings warmth and significance to the idea of returning home. And returning to land, to leisure, to friendship, to art, and to the ordinary rituals that give a home its life. It does not disappear into the landscape. It belongs to it.
