About 4 years back we bought a three acre piece of farm land about 15 km outside of Chandigarh, in Punjab. We still cant recall why we bought it, or what we intended to do with it, but we’re glad we did. It was an obsession that possessed Atul and he did not rest till he managed to buy this plot.
The picture below is one of the earliest I have, however, this is not an image of what the land looked like when we first got possession. It was a messy, undulated landscape and this view is one after lots of labor to just convert it into flat ground and plant grass.
Anyhow, as we went along and after visiting two homes built in suburban areas, the “farmhouse” bug bit us too. It took a lot of nagging and repeated raising of the topic to convince Atul that it may be a good idea to build on a large plot like this. The idea of someday living in a larger home (than our current 2 bedroom flat) surrounded by landscaping, swimming pool, orchard, studio, putting green, barbeque areas, fire sitout etc. etc. finally convinced us that this was worth a shot and we should give it our best.
So project Aura was born in our heads in year 2000 and 8! Excitement grew and reached a point where we wanted to create every single thing ourselves, from the landscape layout, to the house design, the pool detail, the orchard plantation and just about everything else.
This part of my blog is going to document our exciting journey of building our final destination home. So far, I am organized to the point of having segregated about 500 odd pictures and stored them under various heads. Given the limited time I manage to devote to this blog, I will try and upload all of them asap over the next two weeks to bring it up to speed with the current status of the project.
Am not really a skilled photographer, but Anya marked out about 20 arrows (with red paint) on the walking trail around the house to maintain the angles and distances from where I will do the visual documenting. The idea is to present a visual progression of the various projects within AURA. Also to build memories of this journey, and revel in our hard work and passionate endeavors when we’re older 
BTW, Aura is derived from Atul’s mom’s name, who was called Aruna (which means “The rising red sun”). We planned to call it Aruna initially, but Anya came up with AURA, still derived from Aruna, but giving our place an independent entity. Other meanings of Aura are: An invisible breath, emanation, or radiation; A distinctive but intangible quality that seems to surround a person or thing.
