‘How I Built a Mud Home in the Mountains for 1.3 Lakhs' |
As a child, Neha Ballal would spend hours toying with clay. She loved the creative abandon the material allowed. Now at 32, that love has segued into a professional pursuit. Architect Neha, having fashioned a home out of mud and cob (a binder made out of clay, sand, and straw), is now looking at delving deeper into the gamut of sustainable architecture, perhaps even coaching those who want to build a home like hers.
Perched on the shoulders of the mountains in Wan village in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district, the mud home melts into the landscape, as if it were always a part of it. Neha insists that the project, although complete — the building process started in November 2021 and went on for a year — is ever-evolving. “The beauty about a mud home is that it grows with you,” she says.
A cursory glance of the home reveals that it's a mosaic of creative instincts. “Across the years, when I’ve had friends over, I would hand them some clay and ask them to sculpt whatever they felt like. I wanted them to have the freedom to break and to form,” she shares, adding that their handiwork features as decor around the home in the form of curios and animal figures.
There’s a certain magic to mud that draws Neha to it. “That and my experiences in remote areas,” she says. She credits a trip to Nepal soon after graduating in 2015 for piquing her interest in rural architecture.
This was in the aftermath of the earthquake that year, which registered a moment magnitude of 7.8. “We were volunteering to rebuild homes,” Neha explains, adding that the attitudes of the local people and her experiences during the rebuilding made her realise how she could channel her architectural........