Rajah residence, Modera

A four-storey residential building on a corner plot in Modera, Colombo 15, combining an owner’s home with additional apartment units above. The brief asked for a single address that could hold an extended family and still work as separate, private households.

The plot is a shallow trapezoid — roughly 70 ft along a 30 ft wide road, narrowing to 65 ft at the rear, and only 46 to 49 ft deep. That depth is the constraint the whole design answers. Rather than spreading out, the accommodation stacks vertically, and every floor is planned to pull daylight in from the two street elevations while keeping the neighbouring boundaries blind.

The owner’s unit occupies the ground and first floors. At street level it holds two bedrooms, a kitchen with a breakfast bar, dining and living space, and covered parking for three cars, with the service elements — lift, stair core, MEP and garbage ducts, waste water tank and soakage pit — grouped along the rear boundary where the plot is least useful. The first floor adds a 1,300 sq ft family level: a master bedroom with walk-in closet, two further bedrooms, a shrine room, and living and dining space opening onto four balconies around a double-height courtyard.

Above that, the second floor is divided into self-contained units, each with its own living space, pantry, bedrooms and balconies. A glass roof brings light down into the middle of the plan where the depth would otherwise leave it dark, and a planted bed on the rear balcony is set aside for growing herbs.

Two alternative first-floor layouts were developed so the owners could weigh a larger single family floor against a division into two units — a decision that changes the building’s income but not its structure, and one worth resolving before approval rather than after.

The elevation treats the two street frontages as one continuous composition: textured stone-toned render, vertical timber screening over the stair core, glass balustrades to every balcony, and a recessed roof-level terrace. Lighting is integrated into the façade and the boundary planting so the building reads clearly after dark, when most of the street sees it.