Since 2014, ideate has been home to a bunch of people who figured out early that architecture can very well be made into a healthy balance of work and play. The work is intense, but the studio runs on the idea that if one is spending this many hours together, s/he might as well enjoy it. Our studio trips have become quite the talk around here, and we recently went for an office trip to Azerbaijan! We aim to create a community around dialogues, and thus, we host monthly Adda sessions with people who are varied in register and thought. These are open-access spaces for interaction, and you're welcome to show up!
At ideate, we work across five disciplines - urban design, architecture & interiors, landscape, conservation, and research, holding one standard of delivery across all of them. Our portfolio is a consistent body of work that clients have returned to, repeated, and trusted over the years across India and the Gulf countries. The studio has always believed that the quality of a drawing set, site decisions, and execution outlasts imagery.
We started around 2013 with a conservation project on one hand and an international housing competition on the other, and the work just kept pulling us into places we hadn't expected but didn't want to turn away from. Our dedicated BIM wing, opened in December 2025, is part of that same thinking - build the team and the tools to match the work we want to do, with a consistent focus on precise delivery within prescribed timelines.
A heritage documentation job led to landscape work, which led to group housing, which led to master planning entire neighbourhoods in the Gulf countries, and somewhere in between, we were spending four years documenting over 1,200 traditional water structures across Rajasthan and putting them together as a published volume. In any given month now, we could be developing villa layouts and road hierarchies for a developer in Oman while also restoring heritage structures in India, running conservation and restoration work at the French Embassy and French Institute complexes in Delhi and Pondicherry, and keeping alive our self-initiated research in Western UP that looks at the cultural memory and built heritage of a region most people don't think twice about.
At ideate, "We create, therefore we are".
That line sits on our wall, and it means something specific to us - that before we draw, we read, we travel, we argue, and we sit with the problem longer than is comfortable. The conservation work teaches us to be patient with a site before we touch it. The research teaches us to look at a place before we project onto it. And that carries into the master plans and the housing and the interiors too, because the thinking (and by extension, the creation) doesn't switch off when the project type changes.
We inaugurated our dedicated BIM wing in December 2025 because the industry is heading there and we'd rather set up early than scramble later. We are a team of over 35 now across the NCR (with one more studio coming up in Bengaluru), and the range of what's happening in any given room on any given day is still a little bit utopian! But, that range is also why the work stays interesting, why people stay, and why clients who started with us on one project keep coming back with something completely different.
The one thing we've never been flexible about is the output. The standard of a drawing set doesn't shift based on the fee, the geography, or whether the project is for a government body or a private developer. Conservation or commercial, India or the Gulf - the detailing stays the same.
That's just how we work, and after almost fifteen years of ideate, we're fairly set in our ways about it.
Those who show up daily
And make it count
Based in India, our team is a cross-disciplinary mix of architects, urban and landscape designers, conservationists, historians, BIM specialists, researchers, and a good few who don't fit neatly into any one label. On any given week, someone is on-site in Oman while someone else is digging through colonial-era maps of Western UP. That's just how the studio works - the range of projects demands a range of people, and over the years we've ended up with a team that reflects that. We're always on the lookout for the next person who makes the room a little sharper!
