The studio's home city — houses, interiors, workplaces and renovation, designed for heat, humidity and a coast that tests every material.
Chennai is the hardest climate our studio designs in and the most instructive. Heat, humidity, salt air and a monsoon that arrives all at once punish careless decisions: the wrong orientation makes a room unusable by afternoon, the wrong hardware corrodes in a year, and a flat roof detailed casually will find water.
Designing well here means designing for the weather first. Everything else follows more easily once that is right.
Oriented and shaded for the climate, with cross-ventilation planned rather than hoped for.
Full interior architecture, with materials and hardware chosen for humidity and coastal air.
Offices, showrooms and restaurants, with services and kitchens resolved before the styling.
Older Chennai houses re-planned for how families live now, with the structure assessed first.
The tools are old and they work: orientation that keeps the long façades away from the west, deep shading on the openings that need it, cross-ventilation with a path from one side of the plan to the other, roof treatment that keeps the slab from becoming a heater, and courtyards or light wells that let hot air leave. None of this costs money at the drawing stage, and all of it is impossible to add later.
Salt air is merciless on the wrong specification. Hardware, fasteners, railing metal, window systems and external paint all need to be chosen for it, and the cheapest option at tender is routinely the most expensive over ten years. We specify for the environment and explain the trade-off rather than quietly absorbing it. More in choosing materials that age with grace.
