Location
Dubai Hills, United Arab Emirates
Typology
Residential
Completed
2025
Area
35,000 sqft
A house between two landscapes
Ishtika is a 35,000 sqft residential project in Dubai Hills, completed in 2025 for an Indian family who wanted a home rooted in Dubai’s landscape while carrying traces of India within it. The design creates a dialogue between two places, bringing together cultural references and a contemporary response to the desert environment.
Built around a central courtyard, the house uses sand brick, Corten jaali screens, and a grass-covered roof to soften the desert climate and control light and heat. A triple-height Liwan marks the arrival sequence, while a subterranean Sukhabhumi — inspired by the stepped baodis of Mandu — holds a concealed pool below ground.
Throughout, Indian art and objects sit alongside the architecture as carried memory rather than decoration, making Ishtika a sequence of discoveries shaped by climate, material, and place.
The spaces unfold gradually, with shifting light, shadow, texture, and landscape creating moments of pause and connection. Each transition reveals a new relationship between interior and exterior, allowing the home to remain intimate while responding to its surroundings.
About spasm design
Spasm Design is a Mumbai-based architecture practice founded in 1995 by Sanjeev Panjabi and Sangeeta Merchant. Over three decades, the studio has built a reputation for work that responds closely to site, climate, and material — treating each project as a personal, hands-on inquiry rather than a formula to be repeated.
The practice stays deliberately small, favoring close involvement across every stage of a project — from early concept sketches and physical models to construction detail — over scale for its own sake. This intimacy shows up in the work itself: buildings that feel considered room by room, attentive to light, shade, and the everyday rhythms of the people who will live in them.
Spasm’s portfolio spans residential, hospitality, and mixed-use projects across India and abroad, including Ishtika in Dubai — each one shaped by its own landscape and context rather than a single signature style.