SUNDER NAGAR, NEW DELHI

A mood board is not a design

Residential interiors drawn to the millimetre and detailed for the people who will actually build them.

Joinery detailed at 1:10
Specifications name the product
Drawings frozen before site
Six projects a year
Sunder Nagar since 2011
The practice

Six extra weeks before anything is built

The gap between an interiors practice that photographs well and one that finishes well is the drawing set. A mood board and three renders will get a client excited and will not tell a carpenter where the shadow gap runs, which is why so many projects arrive on site beautiful and leave it approximate. Ours are documented: plans, elevations and joinery details at 1:10 for every fitted element, with a specification naming the actual product rather than a lookalike.

Joinery detailed at 1:10, every fitted elementSpecifications name the product, not a lookalikeDrawings frozen before anything reaches siteChange costs quoted in time before you agree
Six extra weeks before anything is built

Selected work

Four of the last eleven. All residential, all in Delhi.

A detailed kitchen island

The shadow gap is where the money goes

Details

The parts of a project a render never shows.

How the practice runs

6
Projects a year, deliberately
14
Years in Sunder Nagar
1:10
Scale every joinery detail is drawn at
6wk
Documentation before site starts

How a project runs

Four stages, and the fee is quoted against each rather than as one number.

01Survey and brief

A measured survey of the actual flat rather than the builder’s drawing, which is almost never right, and a long conversation about how the household actually uses the rooms. Ends in a written brief you sign before we design anything.

02Design

Plans, one option, developed rather than three options presented. Three schemes is a way of making the client decide; our job is to have decided and to be able to explain why. Two rounds of revision are included and a third is quoted.

03Documentation

The six weeks that make the difference. Elevations, joinery at 1:10, electrical and services coordination, and a specification that names products with model numbers. Nothing reaches site until this is frozen.

04Site

Weekly visits with a written report to you the same evening — what was done, what was found, what it changes. We do not take a commission from contractors or suppliers, which is why we can tell you when a quote is high.

From a completed project

Golf Links, eleven months

Our carpenter said it was the first set of drawings he had been given in nine years that he did not have to ring somebody about. The site never stopped waiting for a decision, which our previous renovation did roughly every fortnight. They also told us a quote from a supplier we liked was forty per cent high, and they earn nothing either way.

N
Nandini and Arvind Sethi
Four-bedroom flat, completed 2023
Drawings and notes on a desk

Six projects a year, and we say so early

If the calendar is full we will tell you in the first conversation and give you a date rather than keeping the enquiry warm. Bring the builder’s drawing and we will tell you what is wrong with it for nothing.