The way I build my house

Every weekend, soon after he is done with office, IT engineer V Umashankar Guru rushes to Hosur with a few friends and family where he works to build his home. Completely by hand. No mason, architect or civil engineer. No concrete, plaster, or steel. This DIY house — all 800sq ft of it —is handsculpted out of mud and wood. “It’s my dream home and I have created from floor to roof,” says the 39-year-old, whose mud duplex has cost him around Rs 6 lakh.
In Tiruvannamalai, for the past two years, architect Biju Bhaskar has been living that dream, having built his mud house —with his wife, two children, three farmers, and a couple of shepherds.
The house, hand-built by Umashankar and his family, has a circular living room
The 500sq ft structure, which emerged unharmed by Cyclone Gaja, was built at a cost of Rs 3.25 lakh in 45 days. Very different, says Biju, from his larger ancestral home in Kerala. “We don’t charge money but work on a barter system, where people give us farm products or food in return,” says Biju, who founded Thannal, a ‘natural building awareness group’ to help people build homes from natural material. He is now writing a book on ‘natural building for the common man’.
GREEN HOMES: Alex Leeor’s home in Kodaikanal
Biju has held more than 50 workshops (Umashankar was among the participants), on hand-sculpting homes, which were attended by people ranging from firemen and lawyers to police officers — all with a desire to create habitats that neither cost the earth nor come at a cost to the earth.
While in the past, most of the people who approached Thannal were either the wealthy looking to create sustainable showpieces or the middle class seeking a sense of fulfillment in hand-building their first homes, the demographics have begun to change. “As more locals see the work we are doing, they begin to approach us. Tyre puncture repair shop owners and ration shop employees in Tiruvanamalai have asked for help to build their homes. It’s every person’s dream to own a house and when they realise that building a strong home is possible at a nominal price, it becomes a reality,” says Biju, who is helping 15 farmers in Kerala build their first homes. “These are the people we want to help.”
At Kodaikanal’s Karuna Dham, structures are built using waste like plastic bottles and tyres. “We have students of architecture coming from all over the world to study our building technique,” says Chitra Kumari of Karuna Dham, which promotes earth-friendly community living.
Their flagship home or ‘earthship’, as it is called belongs to Alex Leeor, a web developer from the UK. The circular, 1,200sq ft home took Leeor four years to build, with help from volunteers. “I use solar power and I’m trying to grow my own food too. Almost every day, I have people walking into my house, curious to know how I built it,” says Leeor, who has just published a book, ‘Earthship Chronicles’, which tells the ‘magical tale of a man who built his self-sufficient luxurious earthship home with no experience or training’. “It celebrates five years of living in this home.”
Biju says while India is going through a positive change through natural farming, alternative education, naturopathy and organic food, natural architecture is also the need of the hour.
But, for Umashankar, it goes deeper than that. “In this chase of a corporate life, I feel I have lost myself. The moment I connect with the earth, life feels simple. The feeling cannot be described, only cherished,” he says.