We do not start on the drawing board. We start on the plot — the sun across the year, the fall of the land, the road, the neighbours and the views worth keeping — because the best design decision is usually one the site has already made for you.
From that reading the plan finds its organising idea: where the living spaces or the shopfront face, how privacy is held from the road while the house opens to a garden, how daylight reaches the middle of the plan, and where the structure lands so it never fights a doorway. Every one of those is drawn knowing what it costs and what it does to the cooling load in April.
The result is intended to look inevitable — as if it was always meant to be there — which is the hardest thing for a building to do and the only thing worth aiming at. We work this way at every scale, from a single house to a small commercial development, from our offices in Colombo and Matale across the island.
Appointed for the full service or for a single stage of it. Where we carry a project end to end, coordination with engineering, cost and interiors stops being a meeting and becomes an internal matter.
The layout is tested against the site before it is drawn to be admired — orientation, circulation, daylight and cost resolved at the same time so the scheme that survives is the one that works on every count at once.
The scheme is developed to the level a building application requires and taken through approval, then to the detail a contractor can build from without guessing.
The junctions that decide whether a building ages well — how a load is carried, how water is shed, how two materials meet — drawn and specified rather than left to the site to invent.
We stay on the drawings through construction — answering the site, valuing the work, holding the design to what was approved, and remaining through the defects liability period.
Positions rather than preferences. Each one is something a scheme can be held to at a review, which is the only reason to write a principle down.
A building's orientation is decided once and paid for forever. We set the long facades away from the hard east and west sun wherever the plot allows, and let the site's contours, approach and outlook order the plan rather than fighting them flat.
In a tropical climate the cheapest cooling is the kind you never switch on. Deep shading, cross-ventilation, thermal mass, light-coloured roofs and generous overhangs come first; mechanical systems are sized to what is left.
Proportion is what makes a building feel resolved when nothing about it draws attention. We work to consistent ratios across bay, opening and floor height, and test scale against the human body at the door before the street.
Daylight is treated as a designed element with a quantity and a direction, not a by-product of putting glass in a wall. Courtyards, light wells and reflected light are used to reach the middle of a plan, and shadow is designed as deliberately as the light.
Materials are chosen for how they behave in humidity, monsoon and salt air, and detailed so the way they meet is legible. A junction that explains itself ages better than one that hides.
A visitor should understand a building without being told. The entrance reads as the entrance, the stair is visible from the point of arrival, and each room is reached without passing through another that should have stayed private.
Bring us a plot, a brief, or a scheme that has stalled. The first conversation costs nothing and usually tells you more about what is buildable on your budget than another round of sketches will.
Talk to us