NIT grad revives Himalayan building techniques for climate-smart homes

Vanshaj Mehta watched concrete sprawl consume Himachal Pradesh's mountains and decided to build differently. The NIT-Hamirpur graduate started Make My Hut, a construction firm that treats traditional Himalayan techniques not as heritage nostalgia, but as engineering that actually works.

The insight is straightforward: methods that survived centuries of mountain weather and earthquakes might outperform modern shortcuts. Dhajji Dewari—timber-laced masonry—performed well enough to survive the 1905 Kangra earthquake. Rammed-earth walls regulate temperature naturally, cutting energy demand. Lime plaster breathes with the building, absorbs CO2 as it cures, and produces a fraction of the carbon footprint of cement.

Building with Skill, Not Just Materials

What makes this work isn't just the recipes—it's the people. Mehta's team collaborates with regional masons trained under architect Didi Contractor, whose decades of work revived these techniques after they'd nearly disappeared. Dry stone masonry allows water to drain naturally and structures to shift slightly without cracking, a feature concrete can't match in seismic zones.

To scale beyond individual projects, Mehta launched COWO, a platform connecting local labour with standardised eco-friendly materials and fair wages. It's the unglamorous infrastructure that makes sustainable building actually happen: coordinating suppliers, training workers, ensuring consistency across multiple sites.

Each completed structure in Himachal's hills now stands as quiet evidence that building responsibly doesn't require choosing between performance and tradition. It requires choosing neither to sacrifice the other. As more regions face the same pressure—overtourism, climate stress, the temptation of quick concrete solutions—the question isn't whether these techniques work. It's whether enough builders will commit to learning them.