The studio
A studio that builds. About twelve houses a year.
Antaralaya was set up in 2026 on a simple irritation: that the most expensive part of doing up a home in India is usually the part nobody drew properly.
24
Homes completed
6
Sites live right now
38
People on our own payroll
94%
Handed over within a month of the promised date
What we carry ourselves
The list matters more than it looks. A firm that subcontracts its masonry cannot hold a programme, because the trade that sets the pace is the one it does not control.
A note
Almost every home we are called into has had money spent on it already. Usually a lot. The kitchen is new, the flooring is new, there is a false ceiling with too many lights in it, and the place still does not work. The owner assumes they chose the wrong marble.
They did not. What went wrong happened earlier, on a drawing nobody made: where the daylight lands at four in the afternoon, whether two people can pass each other between the island and the fridge, how you get from the front door to the sofa without walking through a conversation.
So we start there. Half a day sitting in the space at two different hours, before anything is specified. It is the least glamorous thing we do and it is the reason the rest of it works.
We are also, deliberately, small for a company that builds. Thirty-eight people on our own payroll, of whom most are on sites rather than at desks, and one point of view. We take on about twelve houses a year because that is how many we can actually visit every week. Being on site every week is not a service level, it is the whole job.
The studio, Visakhapatnam
What we are fixed about.
We build what we draw.
We spent years handing over drawings and watching somebody else interpret them. Now the same company does both, which removes the one conversation nobody wins: the designer blaming the contractor and the contractor blaming the designer.
The sea is a specification, not a view.
Everything we build sits in salt air. That means higher cover to the steel, marine-grade fixings, and paint systems chosen for chloride rather than for the shade card. Most of what fails early on this coast fails for reasons that were decided on paper.
Daylight is the first drawing.
We plot where the sun lands in each room, at four in the afternoon in June and again in January, before deciding anything else. On the coast it changes the plan more often than clients expect it to.
Local materials, mostly.
Kadapa and Tandur stone, Athangudi tile, lime, teak, cane, cast brass. Not out of sentiment. They handle salt air and a Vizag summer better than the imported equivalent and they arrive in weeks instead of months.
You can have colour.
Plenty of it. What a room struggles to carry is six competing ideas, which is a different problem, and the one that usually goes wrong.
The order things happen in.
Half a day on site, before anything
On the land, or in the rooms, at two different hours. Most of what goes wrong in a house is a light problem, a level problem or a doorway problem, and none of the three show up on a plot plan.
One proposal, not three
Options are how a firm avoids having a view. You get a single considered scheme. We will argue for it, and change it if you make the better case.
The full number, before ground is broken
A line-item budget covering structure, services, finishes and interiors, with our margin shown as its own line rather than buried in the rates. If a number moves you hear it from us that week, not at handover.
We build what we drew
Our own site engineer, our own supervisors, our own joinery workshop. This is the reason we started building at all: when the drawing and the wall disagree, there is nobody left to blame and nobody to send you back and forth between.
Photographs every week, whether or not you ask
Dated, from the same positions, including the parts that are behind plaster now. Most disputes on a site are really arguments about what was there in March.
Back at three months, and at a year
Buildings settle, monsoons find things, and families change. What needs adjusting is rarely what anyone predicted.
And then we finish it
Building the shell is half the job. The other half is light and material, and it is why we plan the daylight before we choose a single finish.
You can see how that turns out in the work: fumed oak meeting bronze, cork against blackened steel, lime plaster and copper. The rooms that came out of these houses are the argument.
See the finished rooms →