Building a house in Jodhpur: plan for the heat before you plan the rooms

Most families who come to us with a plot in Jodhpur arrive with a list of rooms: how many bedrooms, where the puja room goes, whether the kitchen opens to the dining. Those are the right questions, but we gently ask to hold them for a moment. In Jodhpur, the first thing to design is not a room. It is the shade. Summer afternoons here pass 40 degrees for weeks on end, the sun is strong for most of the year, and the little rain that comes arrives in a few monsoon months. A house that is planned around that reality stays comfortable with far less air-conditioning, and it keeps on doing so for decades at no running cost. Having designed more than thirty villas and family homes in the city, this is the advice we give before a single wall is drawn.

Start with the sun, not the street

The plot usually tells us where the road is, and the first instinct is to face the house that way. We would rather first ask where the west is. The west wall takes the full afternoon sun, when the air is already at its hottest, so we try not to put living rooms, bedrooms or large windows on that side. Stores, staircases, bathrooms and a thick, mostly blank wall do well there. Living spaces are happier facing north or east, or opening into a courtyard that the house itself shades.

Windows need the same thinking. A wide sheet of glass looks modern in a drawing, but in Jodhpur it becomes a radiator by three in the afternoon. Deep-set windows, recessed into thick walls, bring in light without the direct beam. Verandahs and generous overhangs keep the sun off the glass and give the family somewhere to sit outside once the evening cools. At The Homestead Villa, the semi-open verandahs on each floor do exactly this job: they are rooms without walls, and they are the parts of the house the family uses most.

The courtyard, the jaali and the thick wall

Jodhpur's older houses knew all of this long before air-conditioning. The courtyard sits at the centre, pulling light into the middle of a deep plan while staying in shade for most of the day. Warm air rises out of it and cooler air is drawn in through the rooms around it. Our Courtyard House in the city is a contemporary home built on this principle: a large family house that opens inward, so every room borrows light and air from a protected centre instead of from an exposed outer wall.

The jaali is the other old idea worth keeping. A carved or patterned screen in stone or metal breaks the sun into small pieces, lets the breeze through and gives privacy from the street without closing a window. It also throws a moving pattern of light and shadow across the floor that no artificial finish can match. Jaali screens, verandahs and overhangs together mean a family can sit outside in the evening, which is half the pleasure of living in Rajasthan.

Then there is the wall itself. Thick walls in local stone warm up slowly through the day and give that heat back at night, so the inside of the house lags behind the outside. A light-coloured roof reflects rather than absorbs. Windows placed on opposite sides let the house breathe once the sun goes down. None of these cost anything to run, and together they do more for comfort than any machine.

Build in Jodhpur's own materials

The city sits on sandstone, and the local stone remains the best-value material a homeowner here can use. It is quarried nearby, cut by craftsmen who have worked it for generations, and it stays cool underfoot. We use it on walls, floors, steps and screens, and we pair it with lime plaster, which breathes, takes on a soft finish and ages gracefully in this climate. Stone flooring and lime-finished walls are the quiet background that lets a family's own things give a house its character.

This does not limit the style of the house. Some of our Jodhpur homes are classical, with columns and deep cornices; others are stacked concrete volumes, glass pavilions and dark stone. The climate rules stay the same whichever way the house looks. Shade first, the west wall closed, light from a courtyard, thick walls and local stone: these are the decisions that matter, and they are made in the first few weeks of planning. The rooms then fall into place around them, usually with more ease than the family expected.

If you are planning a home in Jodhpur, we would be glad to walk the plot with you and talk about where the shade should go before we talk about anything else. Our own site engineers carry each house through construction, and the first meeting is free.

Genre of Design is an architecture and interior design studio in New Delhi, designing homes in Jodhpur since 2009. See our villa architects in Jodhpur page, Courtyard House and The Homestead Villa.