This article explores how the colonial bungalow provided a setting for attempting to bridge perceived distances between English home life and its corollary in colonial India. At the same time, the article suggests that the bungalow gave presence to a kind of “Indian-ness,” a social and material presence that produced anxiety in its European occupants. On the one hand, as the primary realm of English domesticity in India the bungalow provided a setting for the cultivation of habits of self-control thought necessary for comporting the self with authority. On the other hand, the material qualities of the bungalow's construction, along with the social practices it had to accommodate, continually worked against these goals, something discussed in British memoirs, travel accounts, and guides to household management written throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. What tied these two disparate discourses together was the bungalow itself, as a material artifact with distinctive qualities.