Architect in Shahdara, Delhi

To be clear about it up front: our studio is not in Shahdara. It is at CA/200, Shop No. 6, Neta Ji Lanes, near Bhajan Pura Police Station, Delhi 110053 — about 4 km from Shahdara, which is roughly a fifteen-minute drive depending on the hour.

That distance is the point rather than a caveat. Shahdara is close enough that we can be at a site the same morning you call about something, and close enough to go more than once a week while work is running. On a project under construction that matters far more than it sounds like it should.

What we do not do is claim a local address we do not have. If you want an architect who can physically reach your site in Shahdara quickly, the honest version of that claim is the one above.

Most architecture marketing assumes you are starting with an empty plot. In Shahdara that is usually not the situation. It is one of the older parts of trans-Yamuna Delhi, and the work is far more often re-planning, adding to, or rebuilding something that is already standing — frequently a house built decades ago to a layout nobody would draw today.

That changes the first conversation. Before anything gets designed, the useful questions are what the existing structure can carry, what the sanctioned plan actually says, and which of the things you dislike are cheap to change versus structural. Getting that wrong at the start is what turns a renovation budget into a rebuild budget.

Whether you engage us or anyone else, these are the things worth settling before drawings begin. They decide more about the outcome than any style decision does:

• What your sanctioned plan says versus what is actually built — the two often differ on an older property, and it affects everything downstream.
• Whether you are renovating, adding a floor, or rebuilding. These have different approval routes, different costs and different timelines, and the honest answer is sometimes not the one you were hoping for.
• What the existing structure can take. A vertical addition is a structural question first and a design question second.
• How wide the lane is. Material delivery, a concrete pump, scaffolding, and where a skip can stand all depend on it, and it shapes the construction sequence more than most people expect.
• Where your light and air actually come from. On a tight plot with neighbours on both sides, the usable openings are often only on two faces — plan around them rather than discovering them late.
• Whether you need to keep living there during the work. It is a legitimate constraint and it should shape the phasing from the start, not get bolted on later.
• What you want the ground floor to do. Ground-floor commercial with residential above is a common pattern here and it pulls the plan in a particular direction.

On a dense, constrained site the value is mostly in decisions taken early, when they are still cheap. Where the stair goes, which walls are load-bearing and therefore expensive to move, how the services run, what gets demolished and what gets kept. Those are settled on paper in days and cost a fortune to revisit once work has started.

The second half of it is coordination. On a renovation the sequence matters — what has to be opened up before anything can be committed to, what has to be decided before concealment, what cannot be reversed after finishes go on. Someone has to hold that sequence, and if nobody does, it gets held by whoever happens to be on site that day.

Whether your project needs a fresh sanction, a revised plan, or nothing at all depends on your plot, its existing sanctioned plan, and the norms in force at the time — so it is worth establishing before you design rather than after. We handle liaisoning and approvals as part of a project, and we will tell you early if what you want is going to be a problem on paper.

We would rather lose a job at the enquiry stage than take one on a promise about approvals that we cannot keep.

A good share of our work is interiors for buildings someone else designed, and that is a perfectly normal engagement — a flat, a single floor of a house, a shop, an office, a café. It does not need to come with an architecture appointment attached.

For an older Shahdara property, interiors often do more per rupee than structural work: re-planning storage, fixing a layout that wastes its circulation, lighting that was never planned, and getting rid of the built-in furniture that is making rooms smaller than they are.

Shops, offices and food and beverage spaces run to a different clock from houses — the cost of the space sitting unopened usually dominates everything else, so the programme drives the design decisions rather than the other way round.

Our commercial work includes cafés and offices, and on those projects we are candid at the start about what a given fit-out timeline can realistically include.