The Kadamba House: A Two-Storey Home in Karnataka by Studio Contour

We get a version of this question fairly often, from people who live nowhere near New Town and want to know if a Kolkata studio can actually design a house they will build somewhere else entirely, and the honest answer is that we have already done it, more than once, and one of the clearer examples of what that looks like in practice is the Kadamba House, a two-storey home we designed for a client in Karnataka.

This piece walks through what the brief actually was, the decisions we made and why we made them, and what the client walked away with, because at the end of the day a project page can only show you the drawings and the renders, and the part that is harder to show is the reasoning that sat underneath them.

What the brief looked like

The client came to us wanting a two-storey residential architecture plan on a plot in Karnataka, and like most families building their first home, the brief was really a list of competing priorities rather than a single clean idea. They wanted enough separation between the ground floor, which needed to work for daily family life and for guests dropping in unannounced, and the first floor, which needed to feel private and quiet, mainly bedrooms and a small family sitting area away from the noise of the main living spaces. They also wanted the house to sit comfortably in a Karnataka climate that swings between sharp heat for large stretches of the year and a genuinely heavy monsoon season, so ventilation and shading were not decorative asks, they were structural ones from day one.

We handled the architectural drawings end to end over video calls, and the client's own site engineer and local contractor handled everything on the ground, which is basically how every one of our non-Kolkata projects runs, and we will get into why that split works later in this piece.

Spatial planning: why the layout ended up where it did

The ground floor holds the living and dining spaces, the kitchen, and a guest bedroom, laid out so that a visitor never has to walk past the family's more private zones to reach a bathroom or sit down for tea. That guest room on the ground floor was actually one of the first things the client asked for, and it is a request we hear a lot from families across India, not just in Kolkata, because ageing parents or visiting relatives genuinely do not want to be climbing a staircase multiple times a day.

The staircase itself became a bit of a design anchor for the whole plan, and we positioned it so that it reads as a connecting element rather than a corridor, with a bit of natural light falling into the stairwell from above so it never feels like a dark in-between space. The first floor holds the primary bedrooms, each planned to catch cross-breezes given how important natural ventilation is in a climate like Karnataka's, where relying on mechanical cooling alone for the better part of the year is neither comfortable nor efficient.

Elevation and materials: designing for the climate, not against it

The elevation on the Kadamba House leans on a straightforward idea, which is that passive cooling does more for a house over its lifetime than almost any amount of paint colour or ornamentation, so the first-floor balconies and window openings were positioned with sun angles and prevailing breeze direction in mind rather than purely for street-facing symmetry. Vertical shading elements sit over the west-facing openings specifically, because a west-facing wall in most parts of Karnataka takes a beating from afternoon sun for a good chunk of the year, and shading that face properly does more for indoor comfort than adding another split AC unit ever will.

The structural frame is reinforced concrete, which is the standard approach for a two-storey residential build across most of India regardless of region, and it gave us the flexibility to open up larger spans on the ground floor for the living and dining area without needing a forest of columns breaking up the space. Waterproofing detailing on the terrace and around the first-floor balconies got particular attention in the drawings, because monsoon-season water ingress is one of those problems that is cheap to design against and expensive to fix after the fact, and that is true whether a house sits in Kolkata or in Karnataka.

Interior layout and the Vastu conversation

Interior planning followed straight from the architectural layout rather than being bolted on afterward, which is how we prefer to work anyway. The kitchen sits close to the dining area but is screened enough that cooking smells and clutter do not spill into the main living zone, and storage was worked into the plan early, wardrobes, a utility area, and a small store room near the kitchen, so the client was not left improvising shelving after the build was done. We handled the interior design planning alongside the architecture, which is the approach we generally push clients toward, because a floor plan drawn without interior furniture layout in mind tends to produce awkward leftover corners once the furniture actually arrives.

The client also wanted the home to follow Vastu Shastra principles, which is a request we get from a large share of our clients regardless of which state they are building in, and we worked the kitchen orientation, the main entrance placement, and the positioning of the master bedroom around those principles from the earliest layout sketches rather than trying to retrofit them onto a finished plan. Our Vastu-compliant design process is the same one we use on every project we take on, Kolkata or otherwise, since the underlying principles do not change by geography even though the building itself does.

Visualising the house before a single brick was laid

Because the client could not walk our New Town office and look over a physical model, 3D rendering did a lot of the work that an in-person site visit would normally do. We produced full exterior renders of both elevations along with interior views of the living room, the staircase, and the primary bedroom, so the client could actually see how daylight would move through the house before committing to window sizes or balcony depths. This is genuinely one of the more useful parts of designing for a client outside Kolkata, because video conferencing plus a good render package closes most of the gap that an in-person walkthrough would otherwise fill, and it means feedback on things like ceiling height or window placement happens at the drawing stage, where changes are cheap, rather than after the concrete is poured.

We also lean on our 3D visualization and rendering service specifically for this kind of long-distance project, since a plain 2D floor plan asks a client to imagine a lot that a render simply shows them outright.

How the remote process actually ran, step by step

The rhythm of the Kadamba House project is basically the rhythm of every project we run for a client outside West Bengal. The client shares plot dimensions, orientation, and their own priorities on an initial call, we come back with concept layouts, and from there it is a handful of structured video sessions where we walk through the plan, adjust room sizes, argue a little about window placement, and eventually land on a set of drawings the client is genuinely happy with. Once the design package is finalised, it moves to the client's own local team, their site engineer or contractor of choice, who take over construction supervision and, where relevant, filing the plan with whichever development authority governs that plot. That part of the process is entirely local and we do not get involved in it, since our architect team's process familiarity is built around New Town, Salt Lake and greater Kolkata specifically, and we are not going to pretend otherwise for a client outside that footprint.

For a family reading this in Karnataka wondering how the actual sanction process works there, the honest answer is that we simply do not carry that specific local knowledge, and that is precisely why the local engineer or architect-of-record on the client's side handles it. What we bring instead is the design itself, the layout logic, the Vastu alignment, the elevation that actually responds to climate of India conditions in that particular region rather than a generic template, and a render package detailed enough that a local contractor can build from it without guessing at our intent.

Why this project is a reasonable stand-in for what we do outside Kolkata

The Kadamba House is not an isolated case for us. Alongside projects delivered in and around New Town, Salt Lake and Rajarhat, our studio has designed for clients as far as Gurgaon, Jammu, Srinagar, Ahmedabad and elsewhere in Gujarat, Punjab, Goa, Gangtok, Madhya Pradesh, Ayodhya and Agartala, and Karnataka sits comfortably in that same list. What stays constant across all of them is the split we mentioned earlier, we own the design, from the first concept sketch through to a construction-ready drawing set and a full render package, and the client's local team owns everything that happens with a shovel in the ground.

If a client also wants us involved beyond the architectural shell, we offer residential interior design as a continuation of the same brief, so the furniture layout, the material palette, and the lighting plan all come out of the same design logic that shaped the floor plan in the first place, rather than being handed to a second firm that has to reverse-engineer our intent from drawings alone.

For anyone comparing the process of hiring an architect locally versus working with a studio remotely, it is worth reading our take on architect fees in Kolkata for a sense of how we structure pricing, and our piece on who to hire first, an architect or an interior designer, which answers a question that comes up on nearly every project regardless of where the plot sits. You can also read more about Sumana Kumar, our principal architect, who has led the studio's design process since 2014 and has overseen this same remote workflow on every project we have delivered outside West Bengal.

The Kadamba House is a fairly clean example of what we think a good remote-design relationship looks like, a client who trusts us with the parts we are genuinely equipped to handle, and a local team on their end handling the parts that need boots on the ground. If you are planning something similar, wherever in India that happens to be, get in touch and we can walk through what a brief like this would look like for your plot.