A Courtyard for Three Generations

Three generations, one plot, and a brief that sounded like a contradiction: everyone wanted to live together, but nobody wanted to feel like they were living in a corridor. The grandparents wanted to be close to their grandchildren without inheriting every phone call the parents took for work. The plot itself was narrow, heritage-adjacent, and left little room to negotiate.

We went back to a layout Mylapore already knows well: a central courtyard, with every generation's rooms opening onto it rather than onto a shared internal hallway. Meals happen in the courtyard more often than in the dining room now. Privacy comes from how the rooms are angled toward it, not from walls between them, and the grandparents' room gets the morning sun the parents' study never wanted anyway.