Bahria Town Residence

The studio's first project. The client was a young man finishing his education in Canada, a friend of a friend, returning to a very generous brief: an 18,000 square foot plot in Bahria Town, Lahore. A swimming pool. A home theater. A full guest wing for visitors from abroad, with its own front courtyard. A main kitchen and a separate industrial kitchen. Seven servant quarters at the back. This was not a modest beginning.

The house is U-shaped, its two wings connected by a breakfast bridge that spans the central courtyard at the upper level. The bridge does not just connect the wings; it frames the courtyard from above and completes the enclosure. Below it, the courtyard is laid in old Lahore brick, the kind that carries memory in its color. The house was imagined in the material language of the city it sits in: exposed brick, wooden beams, concrete left bare where it could be. Not modernist. Not contemporary. Rooted.

Looking back, the courtyard was already the idea. In 2013, in the traditional materials of Lahore, a language the studio would later move on from, the same logic was already in place: the house turns inward, and the courtyard is the thing worth building around. That position has not changed.