Most vacation homes focus on maximizing sunlight; this little getaway in Maharashtra, India, is all about celebrating bad weather.

“We call it Monsoon Cabin because the house is designed around the notion of enjoying the rain,” says homeowner Mridu Sahai Patnaik, a self-taught designer with a fashion background who is a partner at the firm Studio Archohm. “You can lay on the bed and see it through the sky, or hear it and feel it while you’re cooking.”

It had always been Mridu’s dream to build something of her own. She and her husband, a corporate lawyer, live in Mumbai on the 31st floor of a high-rise, and like many city residents, they enjoy escaping to the Western Ghats for a hit of nature on weekends and holidays. “Mumbai is double the density of New York,” she says. “There’s a need to rejuvenate, to change the scenery.”

The region is known for its monsoons, and out in the countryside, the rainfall feels charming and relaxing. The intense, sometimes sideways, deluges bounce off of low-lying mountain ranges to create what Mridu calls “a green Niagara Falls.”

In other words, embracing the wet weather is essential if you’re going to build a getaway there. And while many folks erect giant farmhouses in the area to hide away from the storms, Mridu took inspiration from an exhibit at the Utzon Center in Denmark—focused on legendary designer Jørn Utzon’s commitment to dreaming big, but building small—to create a relatively humble, minimalist structure that celebrates the beauty of a rainy day.

“I was really excited by the idea that luxury was about conscious living,” says Mridu, who designed the two-bedroom space with a footprint of 1,400 square feet.

“The residential typology in Mumbai has done so much damage to our city...making houses bigger and better than neighbors,” she explains. “I wanted to create an example of how you shouldn’t build more than necessary.”

Thinking outside the box is one thing—actually building it is another. Mridu initially wanted to go prefab with the vacation home, and she hoped to complete it in three months, but the practice just isn’t common enough in India yet; very few companies do it, and Mridu wasn’t sold on the quality of the options she found. “This place has so much rain, it needs some real structural security,” she says.

So with the help of her studio, she went back to the drawing board. The final project wound up taking a year longer than she’d planned—but today it’s standing strong (and dry) on its sturdy stilts.

The extreme slope of the cabin’s A-frame roof is ideal for the rainy region—just one example of how Mridu considered the weather. Large windows line every wall to frame views of the rainforest outside. Inside, instead of using traditional Indian construction materials like mud or wood, she picked raw metal sheets, a material that reflects so much light that the couple rarely have to turn on the lights during the day.

The main floor contains two seating areas, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a compact kitchen. The scale of the cooking area is quite untraditional; it’s built along the wall in a minimalist footprint. For the garden, Mridu also strayed from the beaten path, leaving the landscape wild and unmanicured. “It’s something Indian people don’t do, but if we’re building in the wild, I want to live in the wild,” she says.

The cantilevered second story is one big suite. On the one side, you’ll find a bathtub for soaking in some serious views; on the other, the bed and a cozy niche designed for curling up with a coffee and a book as the rain pelts the oversized triangular window.

Most of the furniture is built in, but a few key collector’s items pepper the space: a Magis Spun chair, a cherry-red Gaetano Pesce Up chair, and a Kangaroo Chandigarh chair from B&B Italia. “I have a philosophy that my husband gets angry about,” says Mridu with a laugh. “And that’s to buy the furniture before I build the space, otherwise there’s no money left. I lived with these chairs in my house for a year and a half.”

Now, she’s happily settled into that Up chair, with the rain pouring down outside. It may not be sunny, but it doesn’t get any cheerier than this.

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Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Studio Archohm/ @archohm

Detail Design & Execution: Design Search Studio / @rajdattadewangand and Diosity / @diosity.ar

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Stormy Weather Is a Delight in This “Monsoon Cabin” Near Mumbai