Aug 1: Indian homes did not always depend on other people to supply their water, their food or the shape of the ground beneath them. A lot of that changed over the last few decades, as cities grew and older, local systems got replaced by pipelines, markets and standard construction methods. Three ventures working out of South India are now trying to bring some of those older systems back into how homes are built and lived in today. Instead of relying on new technology, each one has gone back to older, nature-based ideas and adapted them for how people actually live now.
Biosphere Nature Pools
Biosphere started with a father trying to solve one problem. Vikash Kumar, a chartered accountant based in Coimbatore, wanted a swimming pool for his son that did not use chlorine. Most pools in Indian cities depend on the chemical to stay clean, but it often leaves skin dry and eyes red, especially for young children. Kumar began experimenting at his farmhouse in Pollachi, where he built a swimming pond using no cement and no synthetic filtration, drawing on memories of swimming in village ponds as a child.
The pond worked in a different way from a regular pool. Water moved through a planted section, where aquatic plants and good bacteria filtered it before sending it back to the swimming area, much like a natural stream cleans itself. Friends and neighbours who saw the pond wanted one of their own, and Kumar eventually left his accounting practice to build Biosphere Nature Pools full time. A typical bio pool takes around 45 days to build and can include koi ponds, waterfalls or a winding stream, built mostly from local soil, rock and stone, with imported filtration equipment chosen for how little power it uses. The company now works with homes, farmhouses and resorts across India, and its yearly revenue has grown to around Rs 3 crore.
Swasya Living
Swasya began with two people who wanted to leave the city rather than fix it. Nijish Nair had spent over a decade helping build companies like OYO and Lendingkart, while his co-founder Ashrith Begur had spent years working on sustainable real estate. Both wanted a slower, more grounded way of life for their own families, and they started with a small eco-conscious property on the outskirts of Bangalore to try it out for themselves.
That early experiment grew into Swasya’s main project, a farmland community in Sakleshpur built around the idea of caring for land rather than simply building on it. Each homeowner gets a plot that is farmed using organic methods, growing vegetables, herbs and seasonal fruit that can be eaten by the family or shared within the wider community. The model borrows from farm to table living and applies it to how a second home works, so a weekend away comes with fresh produce attached, not just a garden view. Swasya has since said it plans to expand this model to new locations, betting that more Indian families will want a holiday home that keeps them connected to the land instead of just sitting on it.
Biome Environmental Solutions
Biome’s story starts with Chitra Vishwanath, who did not originally set out to become an ecological architect. She began freelancing in 1990, designing a home for a relative alongside her husband, S Vishwanath, and used the project to try building styles that were unusual for the time. When the couple later built their own house, they used earth as the main material and worked out their own water systems for it, an approach that caught enough attention that word spread and more clients came looking for the same thing.
The choice to build this way was practical rather than idealistic. Bangalore’s soil turned out to be well suited to earthen construction, while its piped water was expensive and energy heavy to supply, since it travels close to 100 kilometres from the Kaveri river and gets pumped up nearly 300 metres to reach the city. Designing around earth and rainwater made sense simply on cost grounds. Around 2008, Chitra’s architecture practice merged with the Rainwater Club, an organisation her husband had set up years earlier to focus on rainwater harvesting and sanitation, and together they formed Biome Environmental Solutions. The firm has since worked across homes, schools, offices and larger institutions in India, treating each project as a chance to test how buildings and water systems can work with each other instead of against each other.
A common thread
None of these three ventures set out to ride a sustainability trend. Biosphere grew out of a father trying to solve a problem for his son, while Swasya took shape when two friends wanted something different for their own families, away from the pace of city life. Biome came out of one architect experimenting on her own home years before anyone thought to ask her for that kind of work. In each case, the idea only turned into a business because it worked well enough that other people wanted the same thing. Taken together, the three suggest that some of the best ideas for Indian homes were never really new. They were simply set aside for a while, and are now finding their way back into use.