Material Archive

1. 01

   Plan before palette

   We do not discuss a single finish until the plan is signed off. Layout and light decide whether a room works; material decides how it feels once it already does. In practice this means the first presentation you see has almost no colour in it, which surprises people — and it means we have never had to move a wall twice because a finish had already been ordered against the old one.

2. 02

   Material over motif

   We specify by material rather than by look, because a look is a photograph and a material is a thing you will touch every day for fifteen years. Every sample is signed off physically, in the room it is destined for, at the hour that room is actually used — an oak that reads warm at eleven in the morning can read grey at seven in the evening, and a west-facing room will tell you that and a showroom will not.

3. 03

   Drawn, not decided on site

   Every project leaves here as a measured set: plans, elevations, a section through every piece of joinery, a lighting layout with switching, and electrical setting-out dimensioned from finished surfaces rather than from bare walls. The contractor receives a specification they can price without guessing at anything. A decision made on paper costs nothing; the same decision made on site by a carpenter at four in the afternoon costs whatever it costs to undo.

4. 04

   Built to be lived in

   We ask who lives here, what they cook, whether there are children or dogs, and which walls get the monsoon. Then we specify accordingly: oiled finishes rather than lacquered where they will be repaired in place, honed stone rather than polished where knives land, nothing veneered within two metres of standing water. A photograph does not show the fourth monsoon. The specification has to.

The team03

Ananya Deshmukh

Principal Designer

Ananya sets the plan on every project and draws the joinery herself. She is the person who will tell you, in the first meeting, that the thing you have asked for will not work — and then show you the two options that will. Clients tend to remember that conversation as the point the project got easier.

• B.Arch, College of Engineering Pune
• Council of Architecture — CA/2016/91744
• IIID Pune Chapter, professional member

Rohan Kulkarni

Design Lead

Rohan owns the drawing set from concept sign-off through to the last shop drawing. If a detail on your project has been resolved to the millimetre, he is the reason. He also runs the sample sign-offs, which means he is the one who will make you touch four near-identical oak finishes before choosing.

• M.Des Interior Design, CEPT University

Sneha Iyer

Project Manager

Sneha runs the site. She is there weekly, writes the progress report you receive every Friday, and prices every variation before it is instructed rather than after. When a supplier tells us a lead time, she is the one who checks it against what they said last time.

• B.E. Civil, Savitribai Phule Pune University

Portrait placeholders are sized 4:5 (1600×2000). Shoot the whole team on the same background and in the same light so the row reads as one set.