Reviving a Chettinad Courtyard

The house had been in the family for over a century, but by the time we were called in, it was mostly used for weddings and the occasional festival. Nobody had actually lived there in years. Termites had gone through the ground-floor teak, and every monsoon found some new gap in the roof to leak through. There was a real conversation in the family about whether to just tear it down.

We replaced only what genuinely couldn't be saved, matching new timber to the old wherever we could, and re-laid the roof from underneath so the original Chettinad tiles never had to come off. The courtyard itself we left exactly as it was, the one part of the house that had never needed fixing, and the family's grandmother still remembers exactly where to sit in it for the evening breeze.