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Robert Stephens has spent 16 years designing buildings, but he never thought he’d ever build a home of his own. “It felt like an impossible dream,” said the South Carolina-born architect, over more than the prescribed cups of black coffee on a rainy Bengaluru morning. “There’s no land and little remaining, available real estate is completely unaffordable,” he adds. But then, the pandemic happened – Robert landed in Bengaluru – and now, here we are, staring at the rain in this impossible place: the Urbs Indis Library & Garden.

The place came to Robert almost like a revelation: underneath a starry sky, sitting barefoot around a flickering bonfire, surrounded by family—it had been years, decades since Robert had felt this grounded. “Through the many years of working as an architect, I’d lost a physical connection with the earth,” he explains. His in-laws had been sitting on an empty plot of land for two decades.“It would be cheaper to build in Bengaluru than buy a 40-year-old one bedroom apartment in Mumbai,” he figured. “Which is insane.”

In 2022, Robert and his family – wife Tina Nandi, son Kairav, and his in-laws decided it was time to take a chance on that starry -night dream. They moved to Bengaluru to build their dream home. “In this city, we get to redesign our lives as well as the way we relate to the city and each other,” he says.

Dewey belong together?

Robert and his family were clear: they weren’t going to build just another home in this city. “I was going to be the client I never had in all of my practice so far.”

And boy, was the best client demanding. Robert and his family wanted their home to welcome the city in—and so, the first thing to go was the barrier between inside and outside. The compound wall, that separation between public and private life—had to go.

And then, there had to be books. Books, books and more books. As we navigate from room to room, the collection takes you on a romp through urban India. “Books are such a central part of our lives, that we wanted our collection to be freely accessible to the public,” Robert says, inviting everyone reading this to visit and share in his obsession with Indian cities.

The collection is a labour of persistence and passion—and the subtext is the problem of public access in India. “I had to get two character testimonials from members to get into the excellent reference section of a particular public library,” he recounts. Even after proving his good character, it took an entire month before the library let him touch the books.

With public libraries doing everything they can to keep out the public, Robert decided to open his shelves to everyone. Popular authorial voices writing on cities sit alongside academic and expert-speak at Urbs Indis Library & Garden. On being pushed to pick out some stand-outs from his catalogue, Robert pulls out Bombay City Engineer NV Modak’s Sewage and Waste Treatment from 1971. “Having a healthy relationship with sewage disposal can change the lives of cities,” he advises. Next, he’s waxing eloquent on Paul Bogard’s The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About We Are before running up the stairs to show LURU Andrew Pettegree’s The Library: A Fragile History. The crown jewel? Robert proudly reveals “the biggest collection in India” of the works of Patrick Geddes. (If you’re asking “who the heck is Patrick Geddes?” Robert would have you know that he was the father of modern town planning, and that he lived in Mumbai between 1914 and 1925. Duh). After this, he goes into raptures flipping through the Census Reports from the 1960s, “beautiful documents with incredible, intense drawings that capture how people lived.”

It is very possible to get lost in this labyrinth of learning, and Robert offers those who wander in here a compass to help navigate: “This library echoes ancient monastic libraries in Europe where there was no designated room called ‘the library’ instead books were everywhere throughout the space but they simply changed genre depending on the adjacent space,” he explains. “So, books on Bombay are in my workspace. Along the stairs, where people come and go, are the books on other Indian cities; in the living room area are books on textiles, food and art and the books facing outwards are presently having on water and sewage management,” he adds. “But this will keep changing as we build the collection.”

The perfect shelfie spot

While “sharing, openness and a sense of being grounded” fuelled the spirit of this space, it was important for it to be reflected in its physical form too, Robert says. It started with only building on 10 per cent of the 2400 square-foot plot; 90 per cent of it remains as their lush, welcoming garden. They’re mostly off the grid, even tucked in the bylanes of Krishnappa Gardens: their sole source of fresh water, they’ve got a 20 feet-deep open well hand-dug by Ramakrishna KR (featured in Issue #2 of LURU, themed The Water Edit) from Mannu Vaddars, a community of traditional well diggers. A second well harvests rainwater.

“Ramakrishna came, found water, built the well by placing granite stone blocks from Kolar along the well’s walls [think Jenga] – the gaps between the stones act as filtration too,” he explains. “Ramakrishna has said, this is one of his favourite wells,” Robert tells us. Inspired by the traditional preference for  a single material — granite from Kolar — Robert designed the curved wall that embraces his office space using similar granite blocks. “But because I’ve got my office space behind, it needed natural light too, so I had the crazy idea of copying the monolithic nature of the stone but in glass,” he says. And here’s where the architect in him shines—he commissioned glass banglemakers in Ferozabad “who can do anything” to make these 105 “strong, luminous” glass blocks that interlock with the 320 grey stone blocks and are “load-bearing too.”

Observing the well-digger’s respect for materials, Robert began thinking about his own use of wood, stone and glass in the structure. And resulted in him “remembering a lot of fundamentals I’d forgotten” about building and living within an urban context.

On our way out, we wash up our coffee cups and Robert asks to pause for ten seconds after and we hear the water falling into the greywater tank. “There’s no disconnect between an action and consequence in this space. It was purely accidental, but I love it,” he says.

The details: BMP 47, Krishnappa Garden, CV Raman Nagar. Open Monday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm. You can schedule your visit here.