A meditation on space, humanity, cultural confluence, and the quiet belief that a well-designed room can change how a person understands themselves in the world.
I think about this sometimes — how strange it is that we build things for people we've never met yet. A waiting room in a clinic will hold someone on the worst day of their life. A child's bedroom will be remembered forty years later when they're trying to explain to their own children what home felt like. A desk will hold the weight of ten thousand decisions.
So we begin there. Not with the floor plan. Not with the budget. With the question: who is this for, and what do they need to feel — not just to function, but to feel — when they are inside this space?
Good design, I've come to believe, is not about beauty as an end. It is about dignity. It is the quiet insistence that every person who enters a space deserves to feel that someone thought about them before they arrived.
But I would push further: design is also why it works — why it was made at all, for whom, with what intention. The why is the philosophy. Everything else is technique.
The Deccan is not a single thing. It never was. For centuries it has been a crossroads — of trade routes, of empires, of faiths, of languages, of ways of building. The Bahmani Sultanate built mosques with Hindu craftsmen. The Maratha courts absorbed Persian aesthetic traditions. Portuguese traders left their arches in Goa, which found their way into Pune's colonial bungalows, which found their way into the memory of everyone who grew up in them.
Our studio inherits this. We draw from Japanese spatial principles — the concept of *ma*, of negative space as active presence. We are moved by the Scandinavian insistence on material honesty and functional form. We are grounded in Indian craft traditions — the precision of Rajasthani stonework, the warmth of Kerala wooden architecture, the geometric intensity of Islamic tilework.
None of these influences cancel each other out. They compound. They produce something that is not easily categorised, which is exactly the point.
This is not appropriation. It is inheritance. The difference is acknowledgment — knowing where something came from, honouring its origin, and allowing it to evolve in dialogue with where you are now.
There is a version of architecture that exists only for the photograph. It is made for awards, for magazine covers, for the social media post at the golden hour. It is made, fundamentally, for itself. And the people who live inside it are incidental — they are the inconvenient organic matter that moves through the pristine composition.
We refuse this. Not because we are purists, but because we have seen what happens when a space is genuinely designed for its occupants. We have seen a patient in a waiting room uncross their arms because the chair held them well. We have seen a child do their homework at the table we made without being told. We have seen a doctor work with more focus in a room where the light was right.
These are small things. They are also everything.
I grew up in Pune. And like everyone who grows up somewhere long enough, I stopped seeing it for a while. The old wadas in Shukrawar Peth. The carved wooden brackets on houses in Sadashiv. The way afternoon light falls differently through a deep veranda than through a flush glazed facade. You stop seeing these things because they are simply there, the way the sky is simply there.
Then I studied. I read Le Corbusier and Ando and Zumthor. I looked at Aalto's relationship with wood, at Khan's relationship with light, at Correa's relationship with climate. And slowly — the way things come back to you when you have been away long enough — I started seeing Pune again. Seeing the Deccan again. Seeing the logic that had always been there, in the thickness of walls, in the orientation of courtyards, in the choice of stone over brick in a region that has both.
This is what we bring to every project: the discipline of a global education applied to the specific intelligence of a place. Not dogma. Not style. Just attention. Careful, sustained, generous attention to who you are, where you are, and what you need.
Design, in the end, is a form of listening. The building is the answer. The person is the question. And the best rooms — the ones that stay with you, that you describe to others years later, that you dream about sometimes — are the ones where someone listened very, very carefully before picking up a pencil.
— Winston Churchill, addressing the House of Commons, 1943
We do not take this lightly. The rooms we design will shape the moods, the habits, the memories of the people inside them long after we have moved on to the next project. This is the weight of the work. It is also the reason we do it.
Design is not a gift to the few. It is not a luxury reserved for those with large budgets and expansive sites. It is, at its core, an act of care — a decision to take seriously the experience of another human being in space. This is our north star. Everything else follows from it.