Home tour: How Sruthi C Reddy turned a modest family home in Chennai into an expansive getaway

For a sense of the attention to detail that architect Sruthi C. Reddy put into her family’s beach house, look at the ground under your feet – yellow spots appear through the terrazzo floor, like sunlight frigid in concrete, consciously rendered in line with the light – mood Dilapidated to her house for the weekend. White but warm, modern but not stark – wide, open doorways leading from room to room and extensive use of glass allowing views of the garden from every angle – it’s a house that lives in harmony with its surroundings. Principal Architect and Creative Director of Ceebros Designworks, 33-year-old Reddy has invested eight months in transforming her family’s cozy home off the East Coast Road in Chennai into something that extends to the needs and requirements of every member.

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The home is on a one-acre property that her father, Si Suba Reddy, managing director of Ceebros Property Development and The Raintree Hotels, acquired in 1988. Over the years, the family acquired the adjacent land as well (another acre), but the main house has remained on the property. status. For Sruthi, who graduated from the College of Architecture and Planning in Chennai and pursued her master’s degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, this was an opportunity to put her specialty — adaptive reuse — into practice. “For 30 years, this house has been where we spent all our holidays. My sister [The Raintree Hotels’s Swetha Reddy] Now she has two children, and with all of our growing needs we realized it didn’t fit what we wanted today,” she says, repeating the challenges of making room for new members in an old family home over time.