How To Build A Community-Forward F&B Hub?

It’s clear as cellophane: Akhila Srinivas is a Tetris champion.

In The Courtyard’s 6,000-square-foot land area on Kengal Hanumanthaiah Road, Akhila — the founder of this social hub — has carefully and creatively fit multiple concepts and cuisines over the past seven years. Besides being the home of Ajji House by the coffee brand Subko, The Courtyard also hosts an open-air community space, Naru Noodle Bar, Wine In Progress(WIP), The Conservatory, and now: Middle Room.

Leave room for growth

In thinking through each of these distinctive spaces within the warm embrace of The Courtyard, Akhila dipped into her architectural past to put “function before form” and honed in on the idea that “design is a solution.” In hindsight, she remembers being “really clueless” about all the ways that “an independent community-forward space could grow and work.” Since its opening in 2018, she has allowed herself the time to improvise. “It’s been a matter of great privilege,” she admits, “because this is our own space. If I had to pay crazy rents, I might have made some very different decisions.” She is also driven by a diktat that has stuck with her since her years as a student at the city’s RV College of Architecture. “You don’t have to build everything all at once,” she recalls. It’s a lesson she gleaned while learning about Aranya, a 1980s low-income housing project in Indore by BV Doshi, the late pioneer of modernist and brutalist architecture in India.

“His theory was that you don’t have to build houses for people; they already know how to build for themselves. Instead, if durable infrastructure like water, electricity, sewage, drainage, and roads were built, a palette of climate-conscious materials was provided for choice, and a few model houses as examples, it would be enough,” she summarises. This resulted in less homogeneous housing in the designated area of Aranya, with each home reflecting the character of the residents. “The needs of the people, the growth of the space and what it is going to hold can inform the eventual outcome of the building itself,” she adds. So, for Akhila too, The Courtyard “has always been a living organism,” from its early days as a barebones infrastructure — metal sheets, beams, and columns, engineered to accommodate its modularity — to its present-day mushrooming structure. “We have added things thoughtfully, one by one, to The Courtyard’s offerings when we’ve felt that an ‘event’ has been done enough as a pop-up and needs a more permanent home,” she points out. “Chef Kavann Kutappa probably did over thirty ramen pop-ups before we even built the first wall for the Naru Noodle Bar,” she recalls.

Constructing a good time

In our chat, Akhila breaks down the design process behind “building the Middle Room for an optimal listening experience.” The “non-aesthetic brief” is the first building block for all of her projects. This ordering of function before form comes from learning first-hand that one must “never mess with the nuts and bolts for anything.” She says, “If the air-conditioning system needs to be 18 tonnes, then it better be; I’m not going to cut down on it because of aesthetics or pricing.” And experience has taught her that in the end, these are the compromises that come to “bite you in the ass.”

Since her first question is always What is the purpose of the room? — every element must be in service of that purpose. Initially, this 35-seater listening room was a cavernous black box “open to artistic, creative community practices and interventions,” but it wasn’t being used to its full potential and became a dead space. Some time in early 2024, Akhila started to tinker with the idea of transforming it. It seemed like a no-brainer in Bengaluru to bring together beer and music. “It’s kind of a match made in heaven, a concept handed to us on a platter,” she says, not having to jog too far back to her own college days of haunting watering holes like Pecos, Styx, and Purple Haze. “These were the only two ingredients needed for a good time in this city: beer and music,” she adds. With this express intention, The Middle Room was designed as a listening room with super-chilled beers on tap.

Armed with this clarity, Akhila has come to understand that building a room for good acoustics is “quite a technical and curious challenge” because each element and material must cater to it. There are pigeonhole walls and ceilings, or wooden panels with a series of small, regularly spaced holes that absorb and hold sound in a space. There’s a large, glass window to look over the open-air, verdant courtyard in the centre, but it’s shielded by a cascade of thick, dark, floral-printed curtains because “glass is the worst thing for sound.” At the aesthetic level, the Middle Room gives the “impression of walking into a music aficionado or LP collector’s home,” but this form feeds into its function as an optimal space for listening to music. The scale of the interior keeps it small and homely, as does the material — wood, leather, and fabric — all great choices for sound. The metal furniture and finishings are minimal. The addition of each element into the space was followed by a series of “arduous, long-drawn-out” acoustics-testing exercises that have calibrated the sound so perfectly that one is guaranteed to never ever hear even the steady, metallic thrum of the air-conditioning or the cacophony of the traffic just outside. There’ll only be the sweet sound of music at the Middle Room!

What else will Akhila fit into this thriving, bustling F&B hub? You’ll be the first to know; you’ve got our word.

The Details: The Courtyard, 105, Kengal Hanumanthaiah Road, Shanti Nagar. Check out their Instagram page for their calendar of events.