Houses, Villas
and Farmhouses.

Private houses and bungalows. Villas and farmhouses, including second homes near Tadoba, Pench and Chikhaldara, where we have worked for twenty-eight years. Apartment buildings and residential blocks. Renovation and extension of an existing house.

The same in-house team draws the architecture, the structure, the services and the interiors, which on a private house usually matters more than it does anywhere else.

Whether the plot can carry what you have in mind, before you commit to it. What the development control rules actually allow. Where the money goes on a house of this size, and which decision made now becomes expensive later.

Bring the site papers, the soil report if one exists, and a sense of how you want to live in it. We will tell you what it can carry.

A site appraisal before anything is committed: what the plot can carry, what the development control rules allow, and what the soil report means for the foundation. Concept and plan development. Structure, plumbing, electrical and drainage. Statutory submission and sanction. Working drawings the contractor can build from. Interiors and FF&E if you want them. Site visits through construction.

The questions worth asking early are the ones that get expensive later. Where the water tank sits. Which wall you will want to move in five years and whether it is structural. How the house behaves in a Nagpur May and a Vidarbha monsoon. Where the money actually goes on a house of this size.

A house asks the same questions a hotel floor does, once each instead of two hundred times: where the drainage stack lands, how the bathroom is ventilated, which wall is carrying load, and how the room behaves at three in the afternoon in May. Forty-five years of answering them at scale leaves a practice with settled answers rather than fresh guesses.

The wildlife resorts are the closest built parallel — low-rise accommodation on difficult sites with long service runs, at Kanha, Pench, Tadoba, Bor and Chikhaldara since 1997. Radisson Jungle Homes at Tadoba, ITC WelcomHeritage Jungle Homes at Pench and Resort Mehfil Meadows at Chikhaldara are all visitable.

A house runs in stages: appraisal and feasibility, concept, design development, statutory submission and sanction, working drawings, and site supervision through construction. Interiors and FF&E sit alongside from design development onwards if they are part of the appointment.

Architectural fees in India are normally a percentage of the project’s construction cost, released stage by stage, and the Council of Architecture publishes a recommended scale that registered practices work from. What changes the figure is scope — a drawing-only appointment and a full appointment covering structure, services, interiors and supervision are not comparable, whatever the two percentages say. Ask any studio for the scope and the stage-wise fee in writing before you compare.

From first meeting to sanctioned drawings is usually three to six months on a private house, and most of that is the plot: how quickly the papers, the survey and the soil report arrive, and how many approvals your particular site needs.

A house is the one building type where the client lives with every decision. That changes the pace rather than the method: the same disciplines, drawn in the same office, but more time spent on the things a family will touch every day.

Four hundred completed buildings sit behind it, and the engineering that keeps a two-hundred-room hotel quiet is the same engineering that keeps a bedroom quiet above a road.

The full scope