Abandoned Office Blocks Become a Textured Retreat in Pune

The Architecture of Forgetting, Then Remembering

What do you do with the structures we leave behind? The site offices that served their purpose and fell quiet, the storage units that outlived their function, the timber frames and steel skeletons that mark an end rather than a beginning. For most developers, the answer is demolition. For AKSH Architects, the question became an opportunity to test whether forgotten infrastructure could be coaxed into a second life, one that speaks less of efficiency and more of experience.

The Earthen Retreat, completed on a 557-square-meter plot in Pune, is the studio's answer. What were once four separate utilitarian buildings, each divided into paired units, have been transformed into a cluster of eight guesthouses arranged symmetrically around a central paved courtyard and swimming pool. The original timber and steel structures remain, but nearly everything else has been rethought through a language of curves, natural plasters, and materials sourced from the immediate context.

A Radical Intervention in Material and Form

Akash Shingvi, founder of AKSH Architects, describes the approach as intentionally radical. The goal was not restoration or preservation in the conventional sense, but a complete reshaping of spatial character. Every surface was treated with natural mud and lime plaster, finished in earthy beige and deep green tones that shift with the light. Arched and curved openings replace conventional doorways and windows. Built-in benches wrap around half of the bedrooms, curving into bedside tables. In the bathrooms, large oval baths and rounded shower openings continue the sculptural vocabulary.

The effect is disorienting in the best sense. It becomes difficult to trace the original footprint of the site offices beneath the layered plaster and organic forms. This is by design. Shingvi and his team wanted visitors to perceive the architecture through texture, light, and emotion rather than through ornament or recognizable typology. The intervention prioritizes sensory experience over legibility.

Open to the Elements, Sheltered by Bamboo

Each guesthouse contains a bedroom and a bathroom that blurs the boundary between interior and exterior. The bathrooms are partially open to the sky, sheltered by bamboo canopies that filter light and allow air to move freely through the space. This decision reflects both climatic pragmatism and a deliberate choice to keep the architecture porous, responsive to the tropical setting rather than sealed against it.

Bamboo, along with lime and mud plaster, dominates the material palette. These are not high-tech or imported finishes. They are locally available, familiar to builders in the region, and carry a tactile quality that synthetic materials struggle to replicate. The bamboo roofs extend well beyond the walls, creating deep overhangs that shade the perimeter of each unit and soften the transition from interior to courtyard.

Externally, the rough plaster finish gives the buildings a handmade, almost geological presence. The surfaces are textured, uneven, and deliberately imperfect. This is architecture that resists the polished aesthetic of contemporary hospitality design in favor of something more grounded, more connected to the act of making.

Curved Forms as Spatial Logic

At World Archi Design, we've been tracking a renewed interest in curved and organic geometries, particularly in projects that seek to soften the hard edges of modernist planning. The Earthen Retreat extends this trend into the realm of adaptive reuse. Here, curves are not decorative flourishes but a spatial logic that governs movement, enclosure, and transition.

Rigid partitions have been replaced by fluid thresholds. Movement through each guesthouse feels intuitive rather than prescribed. The built-in benches, the arched openings, the oval baths - all of these elements encourage a different kind of inhabitation, one that is less about function and more about the choreography of everyday rituals.

This approach has precedents. Eleena Jamil's work in Malaysia has explored similar strategies of using bamboo and natural materials to create permeable, climatically responsive structures. Closer to home, projects like Iki Builds' Aurva Illam near Hyderabad and the Winterfell house in Tamil Nadu have also turned to mud and earth as primary materials, seeking to reflect the character of the Deccan Plateau and the surrounding landscape rather than impose a foreign material vocabulary.

The Case for Earthy, Not Refined

Shingvi's decision to work with mud, lime, and bamboo was not purely aesthetic. In a tropical context, overly refined materials can feel disconnected, imported, out of sync with the climate and the culture of building. The materials chosen for The Earthen Retreat are commonplace in the local construction economy, but they are deployed here with sculptural ambition. The result is architecture that feels both familiar and strange, rooted in place but not bound by convention.

This is a different kind of luxury, one that trades polish for texture, precision for atmosphere. The guesthouses do not announce themselves through expensive finishes or branded fittings. Instead, they offer a sensory richness that emerges from the interplay of light on plastered walls, the coolness of lime surfaces, the rustle of bamboo overhead.

Transformation as Design Strategy

The project raises broader questions about the value of existing structures and the ethics of adaptive reuse. Demolition is often the default, but it carries environmental and cultural costs. The Earthen Retreat demonstrates that even modest, utilitarian buildings can be reimagined into spaces of lasting value when the intervention is bold enough to transform rather than merely renovate.

This is not preservation in the museum sense. The original buildings are barely recognizable. But the structural bones remain, and with them, the memory of the site's previous life. The new architecture does not erase this history so much as layer over it, creating a palimpsest of use and meaning.

A Retreat That Feels Timeless

The symmetry of the site plan, the repetition of forms across the four blocks, and the central courtyard with its pool create a sense of order and calm. But within each guesthouse, the sculptural curves and textured surfaces introduce an element of surprise. The architecture oscillates between the rational and the sensory, the planned and the intuitive.

This is architecture that resists easy categorization. It is not traditional, though it draws on vernacular materials. It is not modern, though it employs a clear geometric parti. It is not rustic, though it embraces roughness. Perhaps the most accurate description is the one Shingvi himself offers: timeless, earthy, and deeply connected to nature.

In an era when much hospitality design leans toward slick minimalism or nostalgic historicism, The Earthen Retreat offers a third path. It suggests that architecture can be both radical and rooted, experimental and familiar, new and old at once. The challenge, as always, is in the execution, in the willingness to commit fully to a material language and a spatial logic that privileges experience over image.

Across the projects we've covered this year, we've seen a growing appetite for this kind of work, architecture that refuses the easy gestures of style in favor of a more embodied, more tactile engagement with place. The Earthen Retreat is a strong example of that trajectory, and a reminder that the structures we abandon need not remain forgotten.