Sumana Kumar

Sumana Kumar is the principal architect and owner of Studio Contour, an architecture and interior design practice she has run out of Action Area I in New Town, Kolkata since 2014. In the years since, the studio has delivered more than 330 buildings across New Town, Salt Lake, Rajarhat and greater Kolkata, and that mix covers single family homes, apartment buildings, interior fit-outs and commercial spaces, so when someone walks in with a plot and a rough idea of what they want on it, she has usually already built something close to it a few streets away. If you are still at the stage of comparing practices in this part of the city, our guide on working with an architect in New Town, Kolkata covers that ground more generally.

The way she practises is easy to describe and genuinely hard to do consistently, which is that she stays on the project herself from the first site visit through to the last one. A lot of what an architect actually does on a house or a small commercial building is judgement work that does not survive being handed off, for instance deciding that the staircase has to move eighteen inches so the ground floor bedroom gets a usable window, or catching on site that a beam has landed lower than the drawing assumed and reworking the false ceiling before anyone tiles anything. Those calls happen weekly on a live project, and if the person making them is not the same person who understood the family's brief in the first place, the building slowly drifts away from what the client thought they were getting. So she keeps that thread in her own hands, and the team works around it.

She is also the author behind the guides, project write-ups and articles published on this site, which is deliberate. Most of what gets written online about building in Kolkata is either generic or lifted from somewhere else, and our view is that if a practice is going to publish advice about ground coverage or sanction drawings or what a renovation really costs in disruption, it should come from the person who has sat across the table and explained it to a few hundred families already.

How she approaches a plot

The first thing she does with a new enquiry is look at the plot rather than the wish list, because at the end of the day the plot decides most of what is possible and the wish list only decides what is preferred. Orientation, road side, neighbouring construction, the width of the approach road, the shape of the land and how far the built envelope can legally go all get settled before a single layout gets drawn. The catch here is that a lot of clients arrive with a plan they have already seen and liked somewhere else, and half the time it simply cannot be reproduced on their land, so it is kinder and cheaper to establish that in week one than in month three.

Once the envelope is understood, layouts start. Her habit is to work in options rather than presenting one scheme as a finished answer, because the trade-offs on a small plot are real and the client is the right person to choose between them, and she would rather show you that a wider living room costs you the second bathroom than quietly decide it for you. Elevation design runs alongside the plan rather than getting bolted on at the end, which matters more than people expect, since an elevation that was invented after the windows were fixed usually looks like exactly that. The underlying constraint on all of it is how much you are allowed to build, and our explainer on FAR and ground coverage rules in New Town walks through how the floor area ratio on your plot translates into actual floors and actual rooms.

Before anything goes to structure, the scheme gets built in 3D. Our 3D visualisation and rendering work exists for one practical reason, which is that most people cannot read a plan and should not be expected to, and it is far better for a client to react to a rendered view and say the entrance feels cramped while it is still just a file. For families who want the layout checked against traditional principles, she handles that as part of the design rather than as an afterthought, and our vastu-compliant design approach is about resolving those requirements inside a plan that still functions, instead of forcing a house to obey a diagram and quietly ruining the circulation.

Working through building sanction in New Town, Salt Lake and Kolkata

A large part of what our clients are actually buying is process familiarity, and this is where the 330-plus figure earns its keep. She routinely takes both residential and commercial projects through the building plan sanction processes of NKDA in New Town, of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation in the city proper, and of the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation across Salt Lake, and each of those bodies has its own drawing conventions, its own document checklist and its own rhythm. Knowing that difference before you draw is the whole game, because a set prepared in the wrong format is not a small correction, it is a resubmission and a delay.

So the drawings leave our studio already shaped for the authority they are going to, the documents get assembled and checked as a set rather than chased one at a time, and the client is told upfront which parts of the timeline are in our hands and which are not. We have written all three processes up in plain language if you want to read ahead: the NKDA building plan sanction process for New Town, the KMC building sanction process in Kolkata, and the Bidhannagar building rules for Salt Lake.

What clients actually work with day to day

The studio is deliberately sized so that a client is dealing with people and not a department. Alongside her there are architectural designers who take the scheme into detail, 3D visualisers who build the views the client signs off on, and a project manager who is the person you call when you want to know what is happening this week. Basically, she sets the direction and holds the design decisions, the team executes the volume of drawings and detail that any real building needs, and the project manager makes sure nobody is guessing about status.

Timelines get quoted honestly at the start. Residential interior design projects typically run eight to twelve weeks from design freeze through to handover depending on scope and site conditions, while ground-up architecture runs several months because structure, statutory process and construction each take the time they take. She would rather lose an enquiry to a competitor promising six weeks than win it and spend the back half of the project apologising.

The range of work the studio takes on

Studio Contour is a full-scope practice rather than a specialist in one narrow thing, which suits this market, because the same family that needs a house designed usually also wants the interiors done and the elevation to look considered. So the work spans residential architecture and apartment buildings, interiors and turnkey fit-outs, elevation design, 3D visualisation, vastu-compliant planning, renovation and remodelling of existing floors and older houses, and commercial interior design for offices, clinics, showrooms and retail. Renovation in particular is its own discipline, since you are working around a structure somebody else designed and around people who often still live in it, and that needs a different kind of planning than a clear plot does.

Talking to us about your plot

If you have land in New Town, Salt Lake, Rajarhat or anywhere in greater Kolkata and you are trying to work out what can go on it, the useful first step is a conversation about the plot itself and not about styles. Have a look through our completed projects to see whether the work reads the way you want your building to read, and then get in touch with your location, plot size and roughly what you are hoping to build. The first meeting is a feasibility discussion, it is where you find out what your plot will actually allow, and you should come away from it better informed whether or not you end up working with us.