A Farmhouse Carved Into Kerala's Hills: Evolving Radical Aesthetics Completes Ushas
An Indian architecture studio has completed a farmhouse built into a steep hillside in Kerala, designed for a retired couple who left city life to cultivate farmland. Evolving Radical Aesthetics, the studio behind the project, named it Ushas. It sits in the Malabar hills near Kozhikode, a coastal city in south India's Kerala state.
Ushas is organised as three staggered volumes — separate building blocks set at slightly different levels — that follow the natural contours of the slope. The arrangement takes its cue from Kerala's traditional farmhouses, according to Dezeen, which published the project on 24 August 2026.
The walls are built from locally sourced black granite, laid in thick masonry. The roof combines corrugated galvanised steel sheets, slender steel rafters and traditional Mangalore tiles — fired clay roofing tiles long used along India's south-west coast. The roof extends outwards to shelter verandahs from monsoon rain.
Among the farmhouse's more striking features is an open-air temple carved into a retaining wall. There is also a dedicated room for reading and practising the veena, a stringed Indian classical instrument, with glazed walls that open onto the surrounding landscape.
Ushas is a working farmhouse, not only a residence. Shelters for farm workers sit alongside the main route through the site, reflecting its dual function as both a home and an agricultural operation.
The studio's principal architect and partner, Muhammed Ashiqe, and landscape architect and partner AR Rumna both commented on the project, though the specifics of their remarks were reported by Dezeen on 24 August 2026.
Evolving Radical Aesthetics is no stranger to Kozhikode. The studio previously designed The Wall of Being, a 4,500-square-foot residence in the same city, completed on a linear plot at a Y-junction in a dense residential neighbourhood. That earlier project, featured on ArchDaily in September 2021, was led by Ashiqe alongside Rumna K. P., with structural engineering by Jithesh Engineers Pvt Ltd.
What gives Ushas its character is the way it folds old methods into a difficult site. The black granite, the Mangalore tiles, the staggered volumes tracing the hill's slope — these are materials and forms with deep roots in Kerala's building traditions. But the open-air temple cut into a retaining wall and the glazed veena room are touches that belong to this particular couple, this particular hill.
For a retired pair swapping Andhra Pradesh's urban life for Kerala farmland, the house had to do two things at once: shelter them through monsoon seasons and support the daily rhythms of working the land. Ushas appears designed to do exactly that, with verandahs that keep the rain off and worker shelters built into the route between fields and home.
