We begin with people,
not walls.
The house is still cold. The first light arrives before anyone does.
Studio Mannva is a residential architecture practice in Chennai. We organise our work not by year or type, but by the memory each house was made to hold.
Selected work
What do you want a home to feel like?
A house that remembers rain
The Monsoon House · Besant Nagar, Chennai · 2022
Manifesto
Ground is never generic. A house that begins there could not have been built anywhere else.
We design from the soil up.
Every soil smells of somewhere. Sand near the shore. Stony ground at the foot of the hills. The packed earth of a city plot, the deep tilled soil of a field. What we call the scent of earth is the scent of a particular place: its minerals, its water, everything that has stood on it and returned to it.
We took our name from it because it names an obligation rather than a mood. Ground carries an inheritance of climate, of geology, of what was built here before and what could be built here at all.
From the ground
Orientation, water, soil and what already stands on the site are settled before a plan is drawn.
True to its place
Materials sourced close, chosen for how they behave in this climate and this light.
Honest as it ages
Structure that reads as structure. We design for the second decade of a house, not the week it is finished.
Residential architecture and interiors.
Design only, developed to full resolution, and followed through on site.
A small number of projects each year, so that every plan, joint and hour of light is decided by the same two hands that drew it.
We are not a construction firm and we do not take on commercial work. We develop the design completely, then work alongside your builders through execution, so that what gets built is what was drawn.
We take on a small number of projects a year. That is a constraint, not a boast: it is the only way we know to stay involved in every decision a house requires.
Start a conversation