Also along Mount Road and adjoining areas are other types of Art Deco buildings, The Hindu office with its stepped form and Connemara Hotel built between 1934 and 1937 are city landmarks. While cinema had come to Chennai in the early 20th century, the later cinema buildings offered yet another platform for the exposition of Art Deco. Casino Theatre and Kamadhenu Theatre of the 1950s stand testimony to this era. The Art Deco house in the city features sweeping porches, stepped corner windows, circular windows and rooms, and projecting staircase areas, with the furniture within the houses having motifs in order to resonate with the larger theme. Houses of the middle and lower income group too aspired towards such expressions as is evident in the City Improvement Trust project of Mambalam and the houses at Gandhinagar. Art Deco continued in the city into the late 1950s, when modernism had started gradually rooting itself. Art Deco served as the base from which modernism took off. Agraharam architecture Some residential areas like Tiruvallikeni (Triplicane) and Mylapore have several houses dating from the early 20th century, especially those far removed from arterial roads. Known as the Agraharam, this style consists of traditional row houses usually surrounding a temple. Many of them were built in the traditional Tamil style, with four wings surrounding a square courtyard, and tiled sloping roofs. In sharp contrast, the apartment buildings along the larger roads in the same areas were built in 1990 or later. Typically, agraharams can be seen where an entire street is occupied by Brahmins, particularly surrounding a temple. The architecture is distinctive with Madras terraces, country tile roofing, Burma teak rafters and lime plastering. The longish homes consisted of the mudhal kattu (receiving quarters), irandaam kattu (living quarters), moondram kattu (kitchen and backyard) and so on. Most houses had an open to sky space in the centre called the mitham, large platforms lining the outside of the house called the thinnai and a private well in the backyard. The floors were often coated with red oxide and sometimes the roofs had glass tiles to let in light. The agraharam quadrangle seen in Triplicane is around the Parthasarathy Temple and its tank, while that of Mylapore is centred around the Kapaleeshwarar Temple and its tank. About 50 families continue to live in the agraharams in Triplicane. However, many of these houses are being replaced with modern