Kavad: A Tiny House That Unfolds Like a Rajasthani Shrine

Every year, the Volume Zero Tiny House competition sets architects one of the hardest tasks in our field: design a whole home in almost no space. A tiny house leaves nowhere to hide. Every decision is on show, every square foot has to earn its place, and the comfortable habit of solving a problem by adding more area is simply gone. That constraint is exactly what makes the brief so compelling to designers, and we had quietly followed the competition since our student years, saving entries and imagining our own.

In 2025 we finally entered, with a project we called Kavad. It went on to receive an Honourable Mention. What pulled us in was never the idea of building small for its own sake. It was the chance to ask a more interesting question: where could a tiny house come from, not just technically but culturally? Our answer began with a 400-year-old object from Rajasthan.

A whole world that folds into a box

Long before Kavad was our building, it was a piece of craft. The Kavad is a portable painted shrine from Rajasthan, a wooden box whose hinged panels open in a careful sequence to reveal layer after layer of painted story: memory, myth, devotion, and the history of a community. It is carried from village to village by a storyteller called the Kaavadiya, who arrives, gathers a small crowd, and opens the panels one at a time. With each fold, a new scene appears and the tale moves forward. A plain box becomes a stage, and a quiet evening becomes a performance.

There is something quietly astonishing in that. An entire world, packed into something you can hold under one arm and set down anywhere. We had met this craft before, through years of exhibition work that brought us close to traditional artists, including the Kavad makers of Bassi. So when we read a brief calling for a tiny, mobile, adaptable home, the recognition was instant. The Kavad was already doing everything the brief asked. It was compact, it travelled, and it was built to unfold. That gave us the one question we designed the entire project around: what if a house behaved like a Kavad?

One house, two living modes

The heart of the design is that Kavad is never stuck in a single mode. It is built to move between two ways of living.

Closed, it is a compact private home. Everything a day needs sits inside a tight footprint: somewhere to rest, cook, bathe, work, keep your things, and pull back into your own quiet. In this mode the house turns inward. It is protective and weather-tight, which is no small thing in the heat and dust it is designed for.

Open, it becomes something else completely. The painted panels swing outward and the face of the house turns into a shaded threshold, a gallery of images, and a stage for telling stories. Opening the home is an act of welcome. The private inside reaches out and spills into the landscape, and for a while the house belongs to the community as much as to the person living in it. The same panels that wrap you in privacy at night are the ones that invite the village in by day. That single, simple gesture, folding a wall open, is where the whole idea comes alive.

Craft used as architecture, not decoration

One decision shaped everything that came after it: craft would not be applied to the surface as pretty finishing. It would be asked to do real work.

So the painted panels are not wall art. Each one does several jobs at once. It is part of the structure of the façade, a shading device against a punishing sun, a privacy screen when the house opens up, and a cultural surface that carries the building's identity wherever it travels. The jaali screens earn their place the same way. They filter the harsh desert light, calm the air as it moves through the rooms, and cast a shifting pattern of shadow across the floor through the day, so the house never looks quite the same from one hour to the next.

This was the point we cared about most. Inherited craft and climate wisdom are not kept here as nostalgia or as a costume. They are switched back on as working tools. These techniques solved hard problems in Rajasthan centuries before anyone owned an air conditioner, and they still do.

Designing for heat, dust, and movement

Rajasthan does not negotiate. It brings fierce heat, fine dust, hard light, and a rhythm of life that is often mobile and shared. We wanted the house to stay comfortable without leaning on machines, so its climate strategy starts with passive design and lets the building cool itself.

Four moves do most of that work. Jaali ventilation draws air through the rooms. A raised floor lifts the house off the hot, dusty ground and lets air slip underneath it. Deep shade from the panels and roof keeps the sun off the walls in the first place. And the stack effect lets warm air climb and escape up high while cooler air is pulled in low, so the building breathes on its own.

Sitting on top of that, a few contemporary systems make the home genuinely livable and light on the land. Cork insulation holds the indoor temperature steady. Solar panels handle its energy. Lightweight construction keeps the whole thing portable. And screw-pile foundations hold it firmly, yet unscrew cleanly when it is time to move, so the house rests gently on a site and leaves it almost exactly as it found it.

A small plan that never feels small

A tiny house lives or dies by its plan. Ours is built around a fixed service core that gathers the kitchen, bathroom, wardrobe, and essential storage into one spine. By concentrating the heavy, permanent, plumbed functions in a single zone, the rest of the house is set free to become almost anything.

That freed space is meant to stay loose. Over a single day it can be a place to rest, to eat, to work, to perform, to gather friends, or to disappear into quiet, depending on which panels are open and how the room is arranged. And because those panels push the usable area outward, the house routinely lives larger than its built footprint. Designed this way, a small home stops feeling like a compromise and starts working like a discipline, one that makes every inch say something.

A home that belongs in motion

We did not design Kavad for everyone. We designed it for a particular person: an artist, a performer, a storyteller. Someone whose work keeps them on the move, but whose sense of who they are stays firmly rooted.

That tension is what the project is really about. Most mobile and off-grid homes are brilliant at independence, and yet they could be set down on any continent without giving the slightest hint of where they belong. We wanted the opposite. Kavad is built to carry memory, craft, and a sense of home along with it, exactly the way the original Kavad carries its stories from village to village. It answers a very modern need to keep moving, without asking anyone to leave their roots behind.

It is an idea we keep returning to. Our demountable Bamboo Pavilion chases a similar thought from another direction, a structure designed to be flat-packed, moved, and rebuilt wherever it is needed.

A closer look at Kavad

What the Honourable Mention meant to us

Out of an international field of entries, Kavad was recognised with an Honourable Mention at Volume Zero Tiny House 2025. You can find our entry among the winners on Volume Zero's official results page. The title mattered to us less than what it seemed to say: that a design grown from Indian craft, climate intelligence, and honest materials can stand confidently in a global conversation about how we might live with far less. For a studio still young, that was the kind of encouragement that stays with you.

How this connects to our everyday work

Kavad started as a competition entry, but the thinking inside it is the same thinking we carry into the homes and interiors we design every day, across Delhi NCR and the rest of India. Begin with context and story. Use materials honestly. Design for real comfort rather than the appearance of it. And let craft do work that matters.

We are Desume Studio, an architecture and interior design practice in Delhi NCR, founded by architects Arathi Anand and Summy Kumar. You can explore more of our work or start a conversation with us. If you are planning a home or an interior that should feel genuinely rooted in where it stands, we would love to talk.