i d e a t e is a design practice based in New Delhi that works across six disciplines – master planning, architecture, landscape, conservation, research, and interiors – all out of one studio, one team, one drawing standard. 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.

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 it 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 खोज बीन 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.

We think, 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, 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 doesn't switch off when the project type changes.

We also opened a dedicated BIM wing in Noida 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 Delhi and Noida, and the range of what's happening in any given room on any given day is still a little absurd – 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 not a tagline, that's just how we work, and after twelve years of it we're fairly set in our ways about it.