Recycled material house

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It’s a tree-lined house on Double Road in Bangalore’s R.T. Nagar, with stone walls and a white wicker gate adding to its quaint charm. Two sections of rope twisted into the number 63 mark R. Viswamurthy’s Thoreau House.


This could just be another one of the city’s pretty houses but it isn’t. For every bit of Viswamurthy’s Rs 1.6-lakh house is made of recycled material, from the walls and floors to its doors, cupboards and even the window panes. Take the staircase that leads to the terrace, for example. The steps are recycled stone slabs, the railing is made of scrap tubes cut to size and the banister is an old green garden hose.

It was partly lack of money and partly his beliefs that drove Viswamurthy to build this house. A mechanical engineer with watch company HMT, he had bought this plot of land at the subsidised cost of Rs 13,500 in 1975. But the marriages of his three daughters cost him his savings.

For years after buying this plot, he just planted trees. Being an avid follower of American author and philosopher Henry David Thoreau and his naturalist ideas, Viswamurthy also founded the city’s Thoreau Foundation. As a tribute, he incorporated Thoreau’s guidelines in building the house, which happened by accident.

One day in 1981, Viswamurthy was sitting in his office when he saw truckloads of stones passing by. On enquiring, he learnt that some wings of the palace of the Maharaja of Travancore had been demolished. So he convinced the business contractor to sell him 14 truckloads at a price of 30 paise per slab and his imagination took the shape of his house, now two decades old.

Then came the problem of making the doors and windows. HMT watches came from different countries in the 1980s and their packing cases were piled up in the company’s stockyard.

Viswamurthy’s company was more than happy to part with these cases, which were used to make the doors and window frames along with the wood panelling in the interiors, wardrobe doors and bookshelves. A teapoy was also built using these cases and topped with a car window. Other imported car windows turned into trapezium-shaped house windows. “All you need is a bit of imagination,” Viswamurthy explains. That, and the will to make a difference.