Emmanuel — The Twin House

A creative studio-residence for a young newly-wed couple in Kurunegala — the home of a renowned Sri Lankan photographer and video editor, designed so that the rhythms of a creative practice and a shared domestic life flow seamlessly into one another.

Emmanuel House was designed for a young newly-wed couple — a celebrated Sri Lankan photographer and video editor and his wife — who came to IMARK RENDER with a brief that was as much about a way of living as it was about a building. He works in light, studies it, chases it. She shares that world while also needing the home to breathe on its own terms. The house had to hold both without one overwhelming the other. The design begins where his work begins: with light. The ground floor is organised around a professional shooting studio that occupies the northern wing, where a continuous clerestory delivers even, shadow-free light across the full working area — the same controlled quality a photographer needs, now fixed permanently into the architecture of his home. An editing suite sits above, separated from the studio not by a door but by a deliberate spatial pause — a stair landing that widens into a reading alcove, a threshold designed to shift the mind from active production to focused review. The domestic spaces — kitchen, living room, dining area and bedroom — wrap the southern and garden-facing sides of the house, capturing morning warmth and the long light of the afternoon. Every shared space was designed so that both people could inhabit it fully even on the most intense working days: the kitchen opens onto a sheltered garden terrace rather than a wall, the dining table is positioned to catch the last hour of natural light, and the bedroom is separated from the studio wing by a sound-attenuating courtyard garden that acts as both acoustic buffer and the home's most beautiful room. The project was also commissioned as a full cinematic walkthrough animation, which Emmanuel used to share the design with family members abroad before construction began. The name — The Twin House — refers not to two buildings but to the two lives the house was made to hold: the creative and the domestic, always distinct, always intertwined.