Ahmedabad: This UFO-shaped weekend villa is an otherworldly escape

About forty minutes from Ahmedabad, not long after the highway has been replaced by fields and the pigeons by plum-headed parakeets, there is a village by the name of Jaspur. It’s nondescript by most standards, no different from the village before or after it. Or so a first impression will have you believe. But inside, past the paddocks of peanut and sesame and the matchbox homes that line the street fronts, is something most locals avow can be found nowhere else in the world. “It’s locally known as the Flying Saucer House,” says architect Tejas Kathiriya, founder and principal of Ahmedabad-based architecture firm studio prAcademics. No, the home, shaped like a UFO, doesn’t belong to aliens, although most people, local or not, will agree that its appeal is nothing short of otherworldly. Commissioned as a weekend villa for an extended family of fourteen, the brief was to design a home that was unique, yet still true to the rural landscape. Exactly how unique it would be was something the family could never have fathomed.