The Forgotten Homes of Kerala Designed for Women's Bodies

The Legacy of Tharavads

A chance conversation with a distant family member led me to Palayil, the name bestowed on my ancestral tharavad. The latter is the name given to a house designed around women. Ours had stood, in some form, since at least the 17th century. My great-grandmother, Palayil Sreedevi, was the last woman in my line to live in one. It was in the southern Indian village of Tholanur.

The Design of Women's Spaces

The house was a nalukettu, which translates as “four corners”: a rectangular structure of jackfruit wood and teak, opening on to a roofless central courtyard called a nadumuttam, with four blocks named for the directions they faced. These were not just houses in which women happened to live. They were houses designed around the female body: its cycles, labour, grief, desire and sound.

The Architecture of Care

The buildings were drawn and built by male master carpenters but the brief was set by women. There is a surviving tharavad 20 minutes from Tholanur, called Kandath. It is now kept as a homestay by its custodian, Sudevan Bhagwaldas, who told me stories over ginger tea before leading me to the purathalams. These are raised, cushioned platforms designed for lounging, sitting diagonally opposite each other across the courtyard. The men gathered on one, the women on the other.

Rooms for Women's Needs

“It has been designed,” Bhagwaldas told me, “so that, acoustically, no word spoken by the women can be heard by the men and vice versa – even if you should shout.” The architecture not only sheltered women’s bodies – it protected their conversations. The kitchen sat in the north-east. The architect Benny Kuriakose, who has restored several tharavads, told me this was because Kerala’s monsoon winds travel from the south-west, so the kitchen’s hot air would be carried away from the house. The women’s bedrooms, on the western side, were spared the kitchen heat. Off them lay smaller rooms: one for childbirth, another for menstruation.

Rethinking the Built Environment

This matters beyond my own family history. Today, 23 June, International Women in Engineering Day celebrates the contributions women make to the design and construction of the world around us. The tharavad raises a complementary question: what happens when buildings are designed around women’s lives in the first place? While the houses were constructed by male artisans, they were engineered to accommodate women’s needs, rhythms and authority. Looking back at them reminds us that the built environment is never neutral; it reveals whose needs, experiences, and lives are valued enough to shape design decisions.