001 / 2024 NANDI HILLS
A weekend house on a rock outcrop, built without cutting into it. Two hundred and forty square metres, exposed laterite, and a roof that collects the entire year's water.
ARCHITECTS BENGALURU EST. 2013
We build slowly, in load-bearing masonry, mostly on difficult sites. Eleven completed buildings in thirteen years is not a productivity problem — it is the practice.
001 / 2024 NANDI HILLS
A weekend house on a rock outcrop, built without cutting into it. Two hundred and forty square metres, exposed laterite, and a roof that collects the entire year's water.
002 / 2022 FORT KOCHI 003 / 2021 COOKE TOWN
A vertical infill on a four-metre frontage, and a rear extension to a 1940s bungalow where the brief was to make the original house feel larger by adding almost nothing to it.
PRACTICE
Six people. We do not have a business development function and we have never entered a competition. Work arrives because a previous client told someone, which means we take about one new project a year and turn down most of what we are offered.
We do not do interiors as a separate service, we do not work on projects where the contractor is chosen before we are, and we will not take a residential commission under 180 square metres — not out of grandeur, but because below that the fee cannot cover the number of site visits we insist on.
“They spent four months on a site we had already been told was unbuildable, and then designed a house that could only exist on that rock. It took two years longer than we planned and we would not change a day of it.”
Kavita Nair
Client, Nandi Hills house
CONTACT
If you have a site and no particular hurry, write to us. Please include where it is, roughly how big, and what made you write to this practice rather than another one — the last question is the one we actually read.