‘A holiday home requires a different approach to a primary residence. It doesn’t focus on how someone lives, but how they wish to unwind.’
The perfect holiday home needs to be both an escape and refuge while also offering one the creature comforts they need. It isn’t an easy task to tick all these boxes. Yet, Rachna Agarwal, Founder and Creative Director, ZOÉRA and Studio IAAD, the former being a boutique practice crafting biospheric residences for globally discerning homeowners, has done so many times over. She shares her tips on designing the perfect holiday home, where the mind is rested and design meets slow living.
When asked how designing a holiday home is different from designing a permanent residence, Agarwal responds, “A holiday home requires a different approach to a primary residence. It doesn’t focus on how someone lives, but how they wish to unwind. One shouldn’t mistake decoration for rest.”
She is quick to point out that every site carries instructions, but the designer must be ready to listen to them. “A hillside slopes towards a particular view for a reason; a coastal plot receives salt-laden wind from a specific direction; a forested plot filters light through a canopy that changes with the season. Ignoring these conditions in favour of a fixed template, whether that template is Mediterranean white walls or alpine timber cladding, produces a house that looks correct in a photograph but feels wrong in the body,” she says, sharing an example.
She adds, “Working with topography means treating gradient, drainage, and orientation as partners rather than obstacles to be levelled away. A slope can become a series of terraces that step down towards water or a valley, and each platform can be furnished differently, one for quiet reading in dappled shade, another left open for a long lunch table, so that the interior programme follows the land rather than a fixed floor plan. A flat coastal plot, by contrast, might need to build its own variation through raised platforms or sunken courtyards, with furnishing choices, low daybeds, woven screens, a change in flooring material, doing the work of creating incident that the topography does not offer for free.”
Climate also shapes material choice and form. Says Agarwal, “A house on the Goan coast contends with humidity, monsoon intensity, and salt corrosion. Hence, material palettes of natural fibres, limewash, and finishes that are meant to age rather than resist ageing are preferred. By contrast, a mountain retreat in a colder climate has a narrower building season. It favours heavier textiles, warmer stone underfoot, and furniture arranged around a hearth rather than a view. A holiday home that fights its climate, in either its walls or its upholstery, spends its first decade being renovated to correct that mistake.”
When asked about the importance of slow living, Agarwal states: “Clients want a holiday home that feels calm, slows them down, and feels like an escape. The designer’s task is to translate that emotional brief into spatial and material decisions without losing the sentiment along the way. This is harder than it sounds. Holiday homes also sit empty for stretches, then fill quickly with family, guests, or the rhythms of a short stay. It needs to feel immediately inhabited on arrival rather than requiring days of settling in, which places real weight on material choice: linens that look considered without needing to be pressed.”
According to Agarwal, the most common failure in holiday home design is taking the brief at face value rather than probing what sits beneath it. She explains with an example: “A family that wants five bedrooms may actually need spaces that allow three generations to be near each other without being on top of one another. This is where site visits, conversations, and a willingness to challenge the initial wish list become important.”
This also plays out in keeping the regional identity of the project in mind. “So, in Goa, one must resist the temptation to lean on Portuguese-tiled façades outside or literal tropical styling inside, in favour of a quieter language that channels the territory’s actual climate, craft, and pace of life,” she says. “A house that tries too hard to look like a Goan holiday home, in its walls or its cushions, usually ends up feeling like a stage set rather than a place to actually live slowly.”
Agarwal ends by saying, “The strongest holiday homes across climates, whether set against a coastline, a mountain range, or a forest, must bend towards their landscape: they defer to it rather than compete with it, and that deference has to hold indoors as well as out. This shows up in material choices. A well-designed holiday home still has a clear architectural identity. For me, designing a holiday home is, at its core, an exercise in translation across two disciplines that too often work in sequence rather than together: turning topography, climate, and the client’s desire for rest into a built form and a furnished interior that deliver on all three. Whether the setting is a Goan coastline, a mountain slope, or a forested plot, the underlying discipline is the same: let the landscape lead, and design the house, inside and out, to listen.”
- Noor Anand Chawla pens lifestyle articles for various publications and her blog.
