Sakshi Asthana · Architectural & Interior Designer
Design-build residential architecture — architecture, structure, services and interiors resolved together, then carried from the first working drawing to the last coat of polish, alongside the people who build it. Two family houses follow: one a renovation, one new; both drawn in full, both built.
The approach
Most projects lose their design between the architect's drawing and the contractor's site. Here design, engineering, documentation and site supervision stay together — so the detail that was drawn is the detail that gets built, and the carpenters, masons and metalworkers are never left to guess.
Concept to working drawings — plans, elevations, sections and site supervision, documented in dual units (imperial and metric).
Structural planning integrated with the architecture from day one — columns, beams and slabs placed to serve the spaces, not fight them.
Electrical, plumbing and ceiling-services layouts drawn to the same rigour as the architecture — every light point and pipe run on a sheet.
Millwork elevations, false-ceiling design, stonework and material palettes — detailed to the half inch, then made by carpenters, stone masons and metalworkers working to those drawings.
Residence I · Built · Case study
The house was built in 1985 for a joint family of fourteen. As the family grew up and moved away, six remained in a house planned around a household more than twice that size. The work was a renovation: keeping the structure and the generosity of the original rooms, and re-planning what sat inside them for the people still living there.
It is organised around a double-height lobby — a 4.6 × 9.4 metre volume at the centre of the first floor, wrapped by a gallery on all four sides and crowned with coffered, cove-lit ceilings. Ivory marble floors with hand-set black inlay borders run through the public rooms; a diamond-pattern medallion floor anchors the space below.
The ground floor carries the social programme — drawing room, formal dining for twelve, bar lounge, a planted courtyard at the heart of the plan, and a family lounge of nearly nine metres square opening to the pool terrace. Above, five suites each take a dressing room and ensuite bathroom, the couples' rooms a pair of them. The terrace level holds a gym, spa and massage suite under a bamboo-roofed pergola.
Every trade on the project — structure, electrical, plumbing, ceiling work, stonework, wrought iron and millwork — was documented in full, and built by craftsmen working to those drawings under a single point of responsibility.
A material is only a decision until someone sets it out. The tile was chosen in a showroom against plank samples, drawn into the balcony as a band within herringbone timber, and laid by tilers working to that setting-out — border, field and all.
The proof
Any portfolio can show a finished photograph. Here the working drawing sits beside it — the same scroll, the same coffer, the same niche — because the measure of a design-build practice is how little is lost in between, and how well a drawing serves the person building from it.
Scroll-motif panels drawn at 2'-10" (864 mm) rail height, set out bay by bay around the void and along the stair — then forged, finished dark, and capped with a walnut handrail. The drawing's rhythm of pattern-panel and plain baluster is exactly what the camera finds on site.
The ceiling drawing sets out the coffer grid over the family living and lounge — curtain trenches at the glazing, moulding profiles drawn at 1:4, beam and girder depths reconciled with the structure. On site the grid reads precisely as drawn, washed in a continuous warm cove.
The arch is plain plaster; everything it does comes from the shadow gap drawn around it. Plasterers ran the curve, electricians set the cove behind it, and the two together make a wall that needs no ornament.
A quiet grid of panels, drawn so that the door into the room disappears into the pattern: the joint you can see running down the middle is the door. Gilders leafed each panel by hand, set within white mouldings under a coffered, cove-lit ceiling.
A nine-metre-high boundary wall turned into the terrace's best feature: brick-clad, scattered with arched lamp niches drawn one by one, with a steel-framed vertical garden alongside. At night every niche glows — an elevation drawing you can photograph.
The documentation
A full working-drawing series — plans, structure, services, staircase, toilet and false-ceiling details — issued in feet-and-inches and maintained in metric. Three of the furniture-layout sheets, with the programme they carry:
Arrival through a spiral-stair foyer into a nine-metre drawing room; dining, bar lounge and family lounge arranged around a planted courtyard; the kitchen wing and puja room to the west; pool and lawn wrapping the east boundary.
Five suites arranged around the double-height void, each with its own dressing room and ensuite bathroom — the couples' suites with two, one apiece. Two TV lounges, a pantry and a terrace off the master wing complete the floor, and the gallery rail keeps every room a few steps from the heart of the house.
A private club on the roof: gym and spa with massage room under a bamboo-roofed pergola, staff quarters tucked behind, and a skylight dropping daylight into the dressing room below.
Materials & millwork
On site
Finishing stage, 2026 — the facade's cornice lighting on trial while the scaffold is still up. The masons who built this wall worked from drawings made for them; walking it afterwards, against those drawings, is the last part of the job.
Residence II · Built
A second family house — three levels and a lift on a 558 m² plot, designed, documented and built. Where the first residence is classical, this one is horizontal and quiet: floating slabs, timber screens, stone and render, planted parapets. Same method underneath — every element drawn before it was built.
The plan puts an 11.7-metre formal living room down the depth of the site, with the informal living and drawing rooms to either side, two ground-floor suites with their own dressing rooms, a puja room off the entrance, and a lift serving all three floors.
The scope ran from the statutory submission through to the joinery: architecture, structure, electrical and plumbing layouts, false ceilings and lighting, boundary walls and gates, the roof pergola, and a room-by-room interior package with its own finishes schedule.
Residence II · Before the drawings
Every room was agreed as a scheme first — palette, materials, furniture and light presented on a single board, so the client could say yes to a room before anyone spent money on it. Eight of them, one per space.
Residence II · The proof
An 1830 × 2740 mm teak frame and shutter, with the stiles, lock rail, 40 mm panel and 10 and 20 mm beading drawn in four sections. Detailed at that resolution, the joinery was made the way it was designed — the carpenter never needed a phone call.
Set out in millimetres — 254 mm going, 168 mm rise — and carried through every floor plan so the opening, the landing and the lift shaft agreed with each other. Built as a folded steel stringer with slim balusters and a timber handrail, climbing through a full-height shaft that brings daylight down to the hall.
A boundary wall is the first thing a house says to its street, so it was drawn as carefully as a room — 2.69 m high in 2.74 m bays, set out twice, once from the road and once from inside the plot, because the two faces do different jobs. It was built in black stone, the bays reading as vertical slots of light after dark.
A steel pergola on 3 × 9 inch box-section columns, drawn in section with its WPC boarding and planter bed, over a deck that meets a field of patterned cement tile. The rain in the photograph is doing what the drawing's falls and drainage were set out to handle.
Residence II · Interiors
Every room had its own wall elevations and a line in the finishes schedule before a carpenter started. The palette moves room to room — sage and mint, teal and grey, botanical green, navy and gold — against pale stone floors.
Each suite was drawn wall by wall — shelving, wardrobes, bed storage and the tiny dimensions that make them work: 1'-6" shelf bays, 2" reveals, liftable bed compartments. On site they arrive as arched niches, fluted fronts and soft colour.
Bathrooms are where a house is won or lost. Each was set out to the inch — basin centre, counter returns, WC and shower zones — with the 20 mm floor drops drawn in so the falls work without a visible slope. Then finished: blue shaker joinery, a solid black counter and a gold-figured tile back.
Residence II · Wet areas
Six bathrooms, no two alike. Each got its own tile elevations — every wall drawn out, tile by tile, with the shower niches, counter heights and floor drops set before a single tile was cut.
Five of the six tile schemes, and one of them built. The vanity on the previous page belongs to another.
Residence II · Bespoke pieces
Where nothing off the shelf would do, the piece was designed and dimensioned like any other element of the house — plan, elevations, sections, materials and finish notes, ready for a joiner to quote from.
The dining table is drawn as a piece of joinery: a solid timber base with turned and bevelled members carrying a marble top, every rafter and connector dimensioned. The chairs come in two versions — natural cane webbing for most, tufted upholstery for the carvers — with a note that all are to be finished in PU colour polish.
The upholstery was specified the same way — overall sizes, arm and back heights, leg detail and finish — so what arrived on site matched what was shown on the moodboard.
Residence II · Ceilings & light
Nine false-ceiling drawings, a lighting plan for every floor and a schedule naming the colour temperature of each room. Ceilings carry the light, the air-conditioning and the cornice line, so they were drawn in section as well as plan.
Residence II · The documentation
Once on paper, once on site. The documentation ran to working plans, structure, electrical, plumbing, staircase, kitchen, toilets and false ceilings — plus the approval set, the lighting layouts and a finishes schedule for every piece of furniture.
The social rooms run along the depth of the plan; two suites, the puja room and the kitchen wrap around them; lawns front and rear.
Every fitting in the house is on a plan and named by type and wattage — 5W and 9W COB downlights, linear COB in the coves, 2W spots over the display niches.
Cove lighting only looks effortless when the trench, the fitting and the ceiling drop were drawn together.
Bed, headboard, side tables, study unit, display shelves — each against its finish: laminate, PU, suede, PU with rattan. The schedule is what keeps a house of many rooms looking like one house.
Drawn to a different brief entirely — no furniture, no finishes, just the three floors in metres, checked against the setbacks and the 24.3 m road.
Knowing which drawing answers which question — buildability, or permission — is half of documentation.