Designing for People Who Stay

A house can look finished the moment the drawings are done, the construction wraps up and the keys change hands. The photographer usually comes while everything is still fresh — surfaces clean, furniture placed, the building matching the design almost exactly. But that, Lakshan Kalugalla will tell you, is not yet the house. It is only the house's best photograph.

Kalugalla, of Vanni Architecture, believes you only find out whether a home has worked much later. “When a project is completed, we normally photograph it and publish it when the house is at its best and everything is still new,” he says. “At that stage, you haven't really seen the defects, the weathering or some of the practical issues that might appear later. It takes at least six months, maybe a year, to really understand these things.” Weather has to test it; people have to open doors and windows at different hours; families have to settle into routines.

Crucially, he does not treat a resident changing a house as a failure. “Sometimes you design a space for one purpose, but when you come back people are using it in a totally different way. I don't see that as a bad thing — as long as they aren't forced to change because of a design flaw. In the end, it's their home.” The useful question, then, is not whether people followed the plan, but why they departed from it — a genuine new way of living, or a workaround for a problem.

That instinct has changed since university. “You might get excited about big ideas — large openings, greenery, connecting indoors and outdoors,” he says. “Then in practice clients ask the practical questions. What about insects? What happens during the monsoon when rain comes in sideways?” Architecture, he adds, “shouldn't only look good in a portfolio. It needs to be comfortable to live in.”

He tells the story of a living room with a narrow slit opening onto a courtyard — kept deliberately small to draw air, frame greenery and let the wall behind the sofa read almost like a painting. “After people started living in the house, especially in the evenings, it became hard to keep the opening uncovered. In the end we had to compromise and add a sliding closure with an aluminium frame.” Visually, it was not what the studio first wanted. “But you have to leave the ego out of it. It might be an art piece for us, but someone actually has to live there. If it isn't liveable, it doesn't matter how good it looks in the portfolio.”

The lesson he draws is precise: there is a difference between explaining a design decision and defending it regardless. “We can explain why we designed something a particular way. But if the client is living there and it isn't working, you have to be flexible.” The aluminium frame was a small correction to a small opening — and, as a principle, a large one: a detail succeeds not because it stays exactly as drawn, but because the design intention and the life around it can keep negotiating.

A brief, he argues, describes the parts of a house more easily than the life that will fill it. “It's not enough to know they want three or four bedrooms. Who wakes up first? Are there grandparents or children? What are their routines?” When he designs, he pictures a specific hour: “An open-plan house at around five in the afternoon — kids home from school doing homework, the TV on, someone making dinner, another person arriving from work. You try to picture how everything happens together.” A room schedule cannot hold that; an imagined five o'clock can.

And a household is rarely one voice. Parents hire the architect; children grow up in the house. He recalls clients with twin six-year-olds who wanted bunk beds, a particular pink, and a plunge pool in the bedroom. “Not everything they ask for can happen, but I still think it's important to listen, and where possible incorporate some of their ideas.” Listening is not the same as obeying — but leaving out the person who will spend years in a room is its own kind of design error.

Which leads to his quiet argument against a fashionable idea — that connection is the goal of a family home. “You need an area where the family can come together, but you also have to provide the privacy they need,” he says. Physical proximity is not emotional togetherness; a six-year-old who wants to be near their parents may at sixteen want the door closed. “You aren't designing only for the family at that moment. You have to think about what it could become ten years later.” Togetherness, in his telling, needs an exit.

He is equally wary of designing a house around the gathering it rarely holds. “You shouldn't have a big space that sits unused most of the time just in case.” Better, he says, two spaces usually separate that can combine when needed, or a terrace that earns its keep daily and flexes for a crowd — readiness without a room kept hostage to a few nights a year.

The most interesting part of the conversation is about the gap between a technically correct room and a chosen one. A plan can prove a chair fits by the window; it cannot prove anyone will sit there every night. He reaches for prospect-refuge theory, remembered from a landscape course: “We might like a view toward a large open space, but we feel more comfortable when the place we occupy also gives us some privacy.” Not a rule to diagnose every behaviour — just a way of explaining why two rooms with identical functional credentials can feel so different to the person inside them.

So he reads an unused space carefully. “If four of five people use a space the way we imagined and one child doesn't, that person may simply prefer something different. But if the whole family avoids it, there might be a problem.” An always-empty chair, a terrace nobody sits on, a window kept covered — none of them proves failure alone, but each asks the architect to look past whether a space works on paper and ask whether anyone wants it.

Even the best visualisation has a limit. Renderings now make clients feel they have already seen their home — “one client told us the finished house felt familiar because the renderings were so realistic.” But “climate and comfort are probably the biggest things you can't judge until someone lives there. There might be more glare than expected, or a material might not handle heat as planned.” A rendering captures one moment of light; a house is lived across every hour and season.

And the family you design for is only one moment in time. One of his clients adopted a cat after the house was finished; a space meant to stay open suddenly needed enclosure, because the cat might get out. “Some things you just couldn't have known,” he says. “Plan ahead where you can, but accept you cannot foresee everything.” It is a modest conclusion for an interview full of them — and, perhaps, exactly why his houses seem built for the people who stay in them rather than the ones who photograph them.