- Tell us something about your company?
SAV is an international award winning architecture and design studio producing highly original, contemporary and intra-disciplinary work.
We see our studio as a platform to explore multiple curiosities between spaces, stories and culture. Combining advanced digital technology with traditional craftsmanship we strive to create spaces that are experiential, evocative and extraordinary.
Founded in 2011, our work has already grown across different continents and involves a wide range of project portfolio consisting of landscapes, highrises, facades, mixed use masterplans, hotels, resorts, private houses, interiors, installations, exhibitions, furniture and objects.
- What kinds of ‘unique interior’ designing solutions or services are offered by your company at par with the current industry standards?
As a design based studio, we focus a lot on bringing a unique story and experience to all our interior space. Since we are a lot about fabrication and design, we offer unique and interesting ways of ‘making’ for our interior projects especially with furniture. Due to our training at the AA, both myself and Vikrant have the ability to bribe different design disciplines of architecture, interiors, graphics and furniture, which is great for our clients who get multiple inputs when they bring us to a project. We are also always adapting to different constraints of time, budgets and skills as well as fluidly interchanging between research, testing and fabricating.
- Tell us something about the Founder/CEO of your company.
The founders, principal architect Amita Kulkarni and principal designer Vikrant Tike, are both alumni of the prestigious AA School of Architecture, London, and bring their varied interests to the table to create a wholistic offering. She obtained a master’s degree in Architecture and Urbanism, while he completed his undergraduate architectural studies and obtained a Post Graduate Diploma in Spatial Performance and Design. After the AA, they both worked for leading international design practices like Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster which helped to shape their current body of work.
- What is the current scenario of ‘interior designing’ segment according to you? How are you contributing to making it better?
Being trained as architects, we see interiors as part of our living environment; an extension of our life and hence its critical to design our spaces that enhance and elevate our quality of living. All our interior projects are shaped from thinking rather than decorating, from experiencing rather than consuming, with a focus on the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what’ .
- What tool/technique does your company use to deliver the safer, economical, and more artistic interior designs to the customers?
We believe in a critical thought process, where we are not afraid to learn from mistakes, as well as have the ability to constantly grow and adapt to a changing world. That way we always like to upgrade our own outputs allowing to integrate new technologies to create healthier and effective solutions both for costs as well as resources in our interior projects.
- What strategies/techniques do you follow to surpass the various interior disciplines such as fire-safety, architectural programming, cost estimating, civil engineering, and more? How are you shaping yourself to become extraordinary in this sector?
We like to think through in a 360 degree manner when we are at concept stage itself. As a team we like to focus a lot of prefabrication as that allows for greater design and cost control. We are a team of architects, designers and makers and hence fabrication, engineering and material research form the core of our studio. This gives us extraordinary control in our details and execution of our innovative designs which otherwise would have been compromised due to lack of knowledge in both costs and making.
- What were the major challenges you faced at the initial phase and how did you overcome it? What were the opportunities that came your way through these challenges?
The great thing about a designer is that every challenge can be viewed as an opportunity to innovate, so we like to challenge our own working processes from time to time. One of the challenges particularly we find in India is the amount of interior work done on site resulting in higher timelines and costs as well as lower quality and workmanship as. We like to overcome this by ensuring most of our furniture is done off-site which gives greater control of designs as well as quality in our execution. Another major challenge is the value of design. Most clients will happily pay for consumer product but will find it difficult to pay design related costs as people don’t understand that greater design inputs will not only have quality in their spaces adding value to their everyday life as well ensure things are built with care and attention. However, we find that view is changing across India both within the industry as well as for the end consumer but much slower than the need.
- Where is your company heading? How your company is benefiting your clients in this competitive world? What is your success mantra?
As designers from the 21st century, we believe in design and technological research as well as thinking agility in adapting to the future. We constantly think of our environment as a single global planet that we live on with limited resources. That automates to our dedication in seeing resourcefulness as a key driver both in design and performance.
There is no success mantra for good design. It’s a constant effort and drives to grow better than the previous day and the ability to learn from your mistakes. For India we also constantly think laterally when it comes to designing better built environments as we greatly believe in working with reusing existing low-tech solutions that work sensitively and effectively.
- Share with us your piece of advice to the young entrepreneurs in the Interior Designing space.
Currently India is an emerging place; wherein things are constantly changing, rapidly adapting and where we feel there is a huge opportunity in design ; especially interior design to make a huge difference to the kind and quality of spaces we are making. The only advise to anyone within the interior design space especially younger startups in India is ‘quality’ over ‘quantity’ as its very tempting to take a huge volume of work due to the surrounding context and situation ; but eventually dilutes everything from our thoughts, our products and eventually our space.
- Please tell us about your current projects. Which are your serving domains?
One of the most interesting projects in the studio that we have recently completed is for  a large 7000 soft open plan interiors for a design and communications agency that defines the ‘future of working environments ’ by overlapping live, work and social spaces creatively. The other is an ongoing project that we have given considerable time is a boutique development of three large villas in Goa that compromise of three thoughtfully developed villas called the Sun, Moon and Earth. These villas define our emphasis on creating architecture and interior design redefining luxury as a series of narrative and timeless experiences.
- How do you see the future of interior designers? Tell us something about your upcoming services/plans.
As a studio we are focusing a lot on understanding the ‘future of design’ especially within workplaces and living. For us working and living has become a flexible stretchable space that is getting more and more overlapped. A lot of new places like We work are capturing this, but we feel there is a huge potential still left to be explored where new technologies and methods of working change how we move beyond the technological era of the 1990’s to a more sociable, interweaved post dot-com physical spaces; that give high quality, flexible and much more experiential interior environments that have a strong connection with nature and communities.
