Architecture for the long quiet middle of a building's life
Thirty Ninety Four Studios is a Bengaluru architecture and interior design practice. We design houses, workplaces and places to gather for clients who want to be involved, on sites we can do something with.
We are a small studio by choice. Principals lead every project from the first conversation to the last snag, which means the people you meet in the first week are the people on site in the last.
The work ranges from a single apartment to a school campus, and across all of it the questions are the same. Where does the sun come from? Where does the water go? What will this wall look like in twenty monsoons? Who is going to live here, and how do they actually live?
We answer those questions with drawings, models and samples, in a studio in Indiranagar and on sites across Karnataka. We work with a close circle of structural, services and landscape consultants and with contractors and craftspeople we have built with before. And we run every project through our own client studio, so that clients, consultants and contractors see the same drawing at the same time.
The name is a number we keep coming back to; the work is what we would rather be known by.
Four things we will not trade away
Calm over loud
A building should be good to live in on an ordinary Tuesday, not just in a photograph. We design for the long quiet middle of a building's life.
Climate first
Bengaluru's altitude, its monsoon and its sun decide the plan before any style does. Courts, verandahs, shade and water come first; air-conditioning is a last resort.
Honest materials
Laterite, granite, brick, lime, timber and concrete that are what they look like. Fewer finishes, better made, maintained less.
Built together
Clients, consultants and contractors see the same drawings at the same time. Decisions are written down. Nobody is surprised at tender.
By hand first, then in the model, then on the wall
Every project begins as pencil on trace: plans tested against the sun, the slope and the rules until one of them is clearly right. Only then does it go into the 3D model, where structure and services are coordinated and where clients walk through the building months before it exists.
Before anything is built, the important details are made full size: a window jamb, a metre of joinery, a square metre of floor. Decisions made with a sample in hand are decisions that do not change on site.
See the five phases
The studio
We work with structural, electrical, plumbing, lighting and acoustic consultants on a project-by-project basis, and name them on every drawing.