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A Community Club was designed between new residences on the site of an old factory. To maximize green space around an existing banyan tree, built mass was pushed to the site’s edges. Rather than echoing the classical facades of surrounding housing, the building was conceived as a series of landscaped terraces merging into the podium. Functions are arranged linearly along a wide veranda (portico), carved from thick stucco walls, facing the central green. Juxtaposed laterally is the Gymnasium—a crisp metal volume clad in silver mesh, lit from within to become a Lantern in the Park.
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The building connects to the surrounding precinct on both levels via multiple entries and pedestrian walkways, ensuring seamless access and integration into the housing fabric. At the lower level, it forms twin plazas—one paved, one green—with programmatic edges opening onto them. Above, pools are directly accessible from the podium. Hemmed in by taller blocks, the building’s full elevation remains hidden; each façade instead responds to its immediate context, creating smaller community spaces in, around, and above the Club. From various precinct vantage points, glimpses of the central Lantern emerge, acting as an orienting marker.
Our sustainability goal was to reduce reliance on mechanical cooling and maximize landscape. Thane’s hot, humid climate and heavy monsoons shaped passive strategies. A 4m-wide south-facing veranda doubles as circulation and climate buffer. Hanging glass screens reduce wind-driven rain. A 1.5m-thick landscape deck insulates rooms below. The anodised aluminium Lantern mesh forms downward louvers, shielding the Gym’s glass façade while allowing filtered light. Skylights bring in controlled daylight. The design retains 25,000 sq. ft. of open green and adds 12,000 sq. ft. of terrace landscape—70% of the site. The project won IIA and JK Cement AYA awards.
This Community Club, with its expansive green, serves as the primary institution within a suburban housing development, offering residents a place to engage in a broad range of recreational, social, sporting, and leisure activities. It houses nearly 40,000 sq. ft. of public amenities.
By treating the built form as a series of landscaped terraces, the design not only creates additional open green space but also establishes a non-confrontational dialogue with the classically styled façades of the surrounding housing blocks. At the heart of the site, the central Lantern—clad in silver mesh and illuminated from within—acts as a distinct visual marker for the community.
Walkways, landscaped decks, and multiple entries are aligned with the surrounding podiums and terrain, ensuring effortless access from all directions and seamlessly stitching the building into the fabric of the precinct.
Our intent is to create a diversity of spaces within and around the building, allowing people of varied interests to find their own place. Through memories and associations built over time, we hope the Club becomes an enduring and inseparable part of the residents’ image of their precinct—and their everyday lives.
Our brief called for a versatile and welcoming community space that would serve as a vibrant amenity for residents of all ages. The Club was envisioned as the heart of a new residential development—an inclusive, engaging place at the center of everyday life. Since its completion, it has become a beloved gathering spot: families enjoy weekend swims, badminton enthusiasts make regular use of the courts, movies are screened, birthday parties are celebrated and children find joy on the rooftop deck.
Dar & Wagh is a design practice that provides integrated solutions for the built environment, with a focus on architecture and interior design.
Amber Dar and Ranjit Wagh, the founders of the studio, were trained in the modernist architectural tradition at CEPT University and refined their skills over a decade of work with two of the most acclaimed practices in Singapore.
They approach architecture as rooted in the fundamentals of human relationships and space planning rather than material experimentation. Their philosophy focuses on clarifying, re-appropriating, and delineating spaces that are exceptionally refined and imbued with a sense of rest.
Dar & Wagh continues to engage with universities in India, including CEPT, in various capacities—as visiting faculty, thesis guides, academic jurors, and members of Academic Review Board.
Their work has been recognized internationally at forums such as The Plan, the World Architecture Festival, Indian Institute of Architects, and Forbes.
