Concepts

To ensure a sustainable and happy lifestyle, it is critical that the needs of a typical family are addressed appropriately within the community. Primary to the needs are ensuring the necessary comforts within the residential home itself. There are significant advantages in designing a living space targeting the comforts to be made available, with a prime example being air conditioning. In India, while most modern office spaces have moved to and are moving to centralized air conditioning, surprisingly this is still not something that is designed and built into residential homes. Air conditioning is still retrofitted into homes, typically by the eventual home buyer. Designing a home for air conditioning requires that space be first designed and built with heat insulation as a primary feature and specification. Surprisingly, even today one does not see heat insulation is even discussed within the context of modern home construction in India. This same principle applies to practically every aspect of a modern home, including technology for home automation, security, sustainable energy, and resource planning.

ClaySys Heights is a project where the entire community planning and design have been based on applying modern technology and innovative practices for ensuring a comfortable and sustainable lifestyle. Each and every villa and apartment at ClaySys Heights is insulated up to an R-Value of R20, which means that the energy utilization, especially for air conditioning is significantly less than what is required for retrofitted air conditioning systems. To put this in perspective, a modern villa in the US with 2500 square feet of air-conditioned space typically requires a 2.5-ton air conditioning compressor unit, even in areas in the US where temperatures reach 50 degrees Celsius. With the current construction techniques and specifications in India, the same 2500 square feet air-conditioned home would require more than 20 tons of air conditioning capacity. Similarly, our home automation system ensures controls for all the electrical points in the homes through a smartphone application but also ensures that the power outlets can be switched on and off through the traditional mechanical switches.

To ensure excellent unrestricted views, we are standardizing on laminated forced entry proof glass for the villas, which provides better safety without using the traditional metal grills on the windows. For the apartments in Kochi, we are standardizing on toughened glass floor to ceiling facades to support the unrestricted views, though due to the existing building code in India a 1.2-meter high metal grill is still required. All such innovations, while significant in their impact, for whatever reason are not available with modern home builders in Kerala. We believe that the base features within ClaySys Heights are simply going to become the standard features in residential homes within the next few years. We are simply ahead of the curve, having experienced this lifestyle when living outside India. What we are doing with ClaySys Heights is bringing such long-proven technologies into an Indian home, in a feasible, practical, and sustainable manner.