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The Residence is the larger of the two buildings. It sits high on the slope, raised on slender steel columns so the slope passes underneath rather than being cut. The whole front face is glass, set into a deep frame that shades it from the late-morning sun. The roof is planted — a thin soil layer growing native grasses and small flowering shrubs that shift colour through the seasons and that, over time, will be indistinguishable from the rest of the slope when seen from above.

Inside, the plan is simple: a long open volume holding the living, dining and kitchen, with the more private spaces tucked behind a stone wall at one end. The kitchen opens directly onto the deck so cooking can happen with the doors thrown wide. There is a fireplace for the cool months — which in this part of Karnataka means December and January, when night temperatures fall.

The deck is the part of the building you will probably remember most. It runs the full length of the front, wraps around the southern corner, and is wide enough that two people can sit at opposite ends and not feel they are sitting near each other. From the deck you look out over the open Savannah — the scrub, the scattered Acacias and Ficus trees, the lake on the far side of Dee Mandala Farm — and on a clear morning you can see all the way to the distant ridges.

The Studio is The Residence’s quieter sibling. A single-room building, smaller in every dimension, set just below the Residence on the slope. A pitched roof rather than a flat one, a small deck rather than a wide one, a single window where the Residence has a wall of glass. From the outside, it looks like a building that knows it is the supporting cast.

It is built for one purpose. The Studio is for one person to come and stay for a while, and to make work. A writer, an illustrator, a researcher, a maker of any kind who needs the kind of stillness that only comes after the first week. The minimum stay is two weeks. The longer ones we like best are a month, sometimes two. Long enough that the day stops feeling like a day and starts feeling like part of a slow accumulating piece of work.

Earthness already has an Artist in Residence — Pooja Acharya, whose paintings of birds and animals hang around the farm. The Studio is for the next person, and the one after that, and the one after that. We are not sure yet how exactly we will choose, but we know that we want it to be a quiet thread running through the years — a small library of work that has been made on this slope, by people who came to make it.

And then there is the slide. You may have noticed it in the photographs — a curving white form descending from the deck of the Residence above, landing gently on the grass beside the Studio. It is the most direct route from one building to the other. It was not strictly necessary. We left it in.