Siddhina Sakla, founder of The Arch Studio, is part of a new generation of Indian designers who are changing how we think about interiors. Based in Pune, her practice works across homes, retail spaces, and large developments, always with a clear focus on making spaces that feel both beautiful and easy to live in.
With a background in architecture and a Master’s degree in Urban Design from the University of Sheffield, Siddhina brings together global ideas and everyday Indian realities. Her time working in London gave her a strong sense of systems and structure, while her work in India helped her understand how people truly use their spaces. This balance shapes everything her studio does today.
Founded in 2018, The Arch Studio has grown into a process-driven practice known for its clarity, transparency, and attention to detail. The team has completed over 100 projects and continues to build a strong reputation across the country. Their work has been featured in leading publications and has received awards, including the Femina Achievers Award for Best Interior Designer.
At the heart of Siddhina’s approach is a simple idea: design should feel right. It should support daily life, reflect the people who use the space, and stand the test of time. In this conversation, she shares her journey, her process, and what it takes to build a thoughtful design practice in India today.
As part of Abir Pothi’s DTalks series, Siddhina Sakla opens up about her creative process, projects and design philosophy.
Q1. What has shaped your journey as a designer—your background, education, design philosophy, and the key recognitions along the way?
Siddhina Sakla: I am Siddhina Sakla, founder and principal architect of The Arch Studio, a multidisciplinary design practice I founded in 2018 in Pune. My formal grounding is in architecture, which I then extended with a Master’s in Urban Design from the University of Sheffield in the UK. The years I spent working across London and later back in Pune gave me two very different vocabularies: one rigorous and systems-driven, and another warm, deeply human, and rooted in how Indian families actually live. My practice today sits at the intersection of those two worlds.
The philosophy that guides our studio is simple: every space should tell a story, one that feels personal, stylish, and enduring. We summarise it in two words on our masthead, Harmony in Design, because for us, design is never only about aesthetics. It is the harmony between a client’s brief, the life a space has to hold, the budget it must respect, and the timeline it must meet. When those four things are in balance, good design follows almost naturally.
ABK Headquarters | Image Credit: The Arch Studio
Over the past few years, the work has been generous in return. I was honoured as Best Interior Designer of the Year at the Femina Achievers Awards 2024, and recognised as a Young Emerging Architect by Lokmat and IIID in 2025. Our projects have been featured in Elle Decor, Architectural Digest, Architect, Interiors India, The Architect’s Diary, India Today Home, Maharashtra Times, and more than 50 other publications. I hold those recognitions lightly; they are really a credit to the studio, the vendors, and the craftspeople who build with us every day, but they do reaffirm that a process-led, story-led practice has a place in Indian design.
ABK Headquarters | Image Credit: The Arch Studio
Q2. How would you describe your signature aesthetic, and how has it evolved within the Indian design landscape?
Siddhina Sakla: I describe our aesthetic as an honest blend of luxury and liveability. Sophisticated, functional, and timeless, those are the three words I return to when I brief a new team member. We do not chase a trend-of-the-season look; we try to design interiors and buildings that will still feel considered ten years from now. Material honesty is important to us, stone that reads as stone, timber that ages gracefully, metal detailing that is precise rather than ornate.
When I started in 2018, the Indian market, especially in Tier-I cities, was still largely polarised between very maximalist luxury on one end and generic, catalogue-driven interiors on the other. What has shifted beautifully in the last few years is the arrival of a confident Indian middle path: clients who want restraint without coldness, craft without heaviness, and homes that feel rooted but not themed. Our aesthetic has evolved with that audience. Early projects leaned more toward European restraint; today, you will see us weaving in terrazzo, hand-finished plasters, Indian stones like Kadappa and green marble, cane, brass inlays, and commissioned artwork, but always edited, never layered for the sake of it.
Across Jade Residence, The Walnut Den, Muted Abode and Earthy Dream Home, you can actually trace that evolution. Each one is recognisably from the same studio, but also unmistakably belongs to its client and its city.
Q3. Who or what are your biggest influences and inspirations, and how does Indian culture shape the way you design?
Siddhina Sakla: My influences are a mix of the global and the very local. Academically, urban design at Sheffield taught me to read a place before I design into it, to look at light, movement, street life, and memory before I look at the plan. That habit has never left me. From the international canon, I am drawn to architects and designers who work with discipline and silence, people who know when to stop adding. Closer home, I am influenced by the masters of Indian modernism, the way Charles Correa, B. V. Doshi and Geoffrey Bawa (across the strait) treated climate, courtyard and craft as design elements rather than afterthoughts.
Indian culture shapes my work less as motif and more as a method. The way a Pune home still opens up for a puja or a family gathering, the way light enters differently in a Chennai apartment than in an Indore bungalow; the way a Mumbai retail space has to earn its footfall in the first three seconds, these are cultural realities, not stylistic ones, and they dictate plan before elevation. When I do bring in explicitly Indian elements, a jaali, a temple alcove, a handloom textile, a piece of Channapatna or Kutch work, it is because the client’s life called for it, not because the moodboard did.
Q4. Walk us through your creative process from the first client conversation to the finished space.
Siddhina Sakla: We describe our process in four simple verbs: We Listen, We Design, We Execute, We Deliver. The order is deliberate, and the first verb is the most important one.
Listening, for us, is a structured exercise. Before we sketch anything, we sit with the client often more than once and map how they actually use a space. Who cooks, who entertains, who works from home, which corner the grandparents will occupy, which festivals the house has to host. For commercial and hospitality clients, we do the same with the brand: what is the customer journey, what is the dwell time, what is the one feeling the space has to leave behind. Only then do we begin design.
The design stage is where our studio language comes in, spatial planning, materiality, lighting and detailing all developed through drawings, 3D walkthroughs, and sample boards the client can touch. We present options, we debate them honestly, and we lock a design only when we are sure it can be built to the drawing.
Cedar Cane | Image Credit: The Arch Studio
Execution is where many Indian practices lose the plot, so we have invested heavily there. Every project runs on our MIS-driven system: a live client dashboard, automated Minutes of Meetings, a detailed Project Management System, transparent BOQ and payment tracking, site-stage checklists, and photo-documented progress reports. Our promise to the client is simple: every detail, every update, at your fingertips. Delivery, finally, is not the day we hand over keys; it is the day the client walks in, and the space feels exactly the way we said it would, on the timeline we committed to.
Q5. How do you collaborate with artisans and craftspeople, and what role do they play in your projects?
Siddhina Sakla: Artisans are not vendors to us, they are co-authors. A project like Jade Residence or The Walnut Den is what it is because the carpenter, the stone artisan, the metal fabricator and the upholsterer each brought a level of skill to the table that no drawing alone could produce. We have built a strong, loyal vendor and craft network over the years. Some of our partners have been with the studio since our very first project, and a good part of our on-time delivery record comes from that trust.
Practically, we involve craftspeople early. If a project includes a bespoke wall finish, a hand-inlaid floor, a carved jaali, a custom light, or a commissioned piece of furniture, the artisan is brought in at the design stage, not at execution. We prototype on-site, revise together, and credit their work. For me, the most satisfying moments in a project are not the magazine photographs; they are the moments on site when a karigar steps back from a finish he has just completed and quietly smiles. That is the handover that matters.
There is also a larger responsibility here. India’s craft economy is fragile, and every design practice that commissions a hand-finished element is keeping a workshop running for another month. I take that seriously, and I would like our studio to keep doing more of it, not less.
Q6. Looking at your portfolio so far, was there a turning-point project for you, and which recent project are you most proud of?
Siddhina Sakla: The turning point for the studio was when we started taking on Developer’s Den work alongside our residential and boutique interiors. The Presidential Tower — a 100-metre, roughly three-lakh square foot project in PCMC — stretched us in the best possible way. It taught us how to scale our process without losing the intimacy of a boutique practice, and it forced us to mature our systems. A lot of the MIS-driven rigour our residential clients now benefit from was born on projects of that scale.
Cedar Cane | Image Credit: The Arch Studio
Among recent projects, Jade Residence holds a special place in my heart. It is, in many ways, a distillation of everything the studio believes in — a home that is unmistakably luxurious, but also lived-in, warm, and entirely specific to its family. When Harrshada Deshpande, the client, described moving in as ‘coming home to a space that finally sounds like us’, I knew we had done our job. I am also very proud of The Walnut Den for its restraint, Muted Abode for its tonal discipline, and Zah and The First Salon for how confidently their brand personalities come through in retail space.
Q7. What are the biggest challenges and opportunities you see for emerging Indian designers today?
Siddhina Sakla: The honest challenges first. The Indian design industry is still catching up on transparency around cost, timeline, and scope. Clients who have had a bad experience often arrive with understandable scepticism, and young designers inherit that scepticism even when they have done nothing to earn it. There is also a scale problem: very talented young designers can do beautiful one-off projects, but building the systems to deliver consistently across ten, twenty, or fifty projects is a different muscle, and it is one we do not teach enough in our architecture schools.
The opportunities, though, are unprecedented. Indian clients today are more informed, better-travelled, and more willing to commission thoughtful work than ever before. Tier-II and Tier-III cities, including Indore, Nashik, Nagpur, Kochi, and Ahmedabad, are commissioning exceptional residential and hospitality projects, and they are open to design voices that are not Mumbai- or Delhi-based. Our Pan India presence, which now extends from Pune to Mumbai, Chennai and Indore with more cities to come, has only been possible because of this shift. For a young Indian designer willing to work with rigour, there has never been a better decade to start a practice.
Q8. How do you approach sustainability in your work?
Siddhina Sakla: Sustainability, for us, begins with longevity. The most sustainable building is the one you do not have to redo in five years. So before we talk about rated materials or certifications, we talk about designing spaces and buildings that will still function, still feel right, and still look considered a decade from now. Timeless design is, quietly, a sustainability strategy.
On the technical side, we work on passive strategies wherever the site allows — orientation, cross-ventilation, daylight, shading, thermal mass. On material, we prefer local stones, Indian hardwoods from responsible sources, lime and mineral-based plasters over synthetic finishes, low-VOC paints, and we actively design out unnecessary false ceilings and gypsum when a plastered soffit will do. On execution, our MIS-driven BOQ tracking means we order precisely and waste less — fewer trips to the site, fewer off-cuts, less rework. These are not headline moves, but cumulatively they matter.
We also try to design for adaptability. A family home should be able to become a three-generation home; a retail shell should be able to host a different brand in five years without being gutted. Designing for that kind of future use is, to me, the most under-discussed form of sustainability in Indian practice.
Q9. Is there a recent design, material, or idea you have discovered that has excited you?
Siddhina Sakla: Two things, recently. First — the return of hand-finished wall surfaces, and specifically Indian-adapted lime and tadelakt-style plasters. They give us the depth and softness that paint simply cannot, they age beautifully, and they put skilled hands back on site. We used variations of these on Muted Abode and Earthy Dream Home, and the way light moves across those walls through the day is something a sample board can never quite predict.
Second — and this is less a material and more a quiet shift — I am excited by the maturing of the Indian client conversation around silence in design. Clients are asking for fewer things, but better things. Fewer accent walls, better joinery. Fewer light fittings, better lighting. That kind of brief is a gift to any studio that believes in restraint, and it is making our work better.
Q10. What strategies have worked best for you in building the studio’s visibility?
Siddhina Sakla: The single most effective strategy, by a long margin, has been doing the work well and letting it travel. Our strongest referrals have always come from clients whose projects were handed over on time and on budget, with no post-delivery surprises. The studio’s MIS-driven process was built for quality of experience first, but it has turned out to be the best marketing tool we have.
Cedar Cane | Image Credit: The Arch Studio
Alongside that, we invest in three deliberate channels. Editorial — we are thoughtful about the publications we feature in, and we have been fortunate to be covered across Elle Decor, AD, Architect and Interiors India, India Today Home, Glitz, The Architect’s Diary and Maharashtra Times. Social — our Instagram and website carry the full range of the studio’s voice, from finished interiors to process behind-the-scenes. And credentials — we do enter for awards, not for the trophy, but because the discipline of writing up a project for a jury forces you to articulate why it worked.
What we do not do is chase visibility at the cost of the work. I would rather publish one well-built project in a year than ten hurried ones.
Q11. What are your dos and don’ts for young designers, and which forums or platforms would you recommend they engage with?
Siddhina Sakla: The dos are unglamorous, but they are everything.
- Do spend time on the site. The drawing learns more in a day on site than in a week in the studio.
- Do invest in your process before you invest in your aesthetic. Style will change. Discipline will carry you.
- Do document your work honestly — drawings, photographs, and a short written rationale for every project.
- Do build long-term relationships with your vendors and craftspeople. They will save your career at least twice.
- Do price your work fairly. Underpricing is not humility; it is a slow way of harming the practice and the profession.
The don’ts are just as important.
- Don’t design for the camera. Design for the life that will be lived there on an ordinary Tuesday.
- Don’t copy — reference, yes; absorb, yes; but find your own voice, because clients can tell.
- Don’t promise timelines you have not yet built the systems to deliver.
- Don’t confuse being busy with being good. Say no to the wrong brief.
In terms of platforms to engage with, I recommend the Indian Institute of Interior Designers (IIID) and the Council of Architecture for professional grounding, and the Indian Institute of Architects’ chapter events for peer exposure. Follow editorial platforms like Architectural Digest India, Elle Decor India, Architect and Interiors India, The Architect’s Diary, and Design Pataki. For a global perspective, Dezeen, ArchDaily and Domus are worth a regular read. Beyond forums, I would strongly encourage young designers to attend India Design ID in Delhi and the IIID Design Excellence events — being in a room full of practitioners does more for a young career than any online feed.
Q12. Looking ahead, what direction do you see The Arch Studio — and your own practice — taking?
Siddhina Sakla: Our near-term direction is consolidation before expansion. We are a Pan-India studio today, with active projects across Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, and Indore, with more cities on the way. Before we open further, we want to deepen the systems that allow us to deliver with the same intimacy in a city we are not physically sitting in — our client dashboard, our site protocols, our vendor network. If we get that right, geography becomes less of a constraint.
Programmatically, I see us doing more in hospitality and retail sectors, where brand, spatial storytelling, and operational rigour all have to converge. We are also excited by the Developer’s Den vertical: working with developers on the design of the actual product they deliver, not just the sample apartment. Indian real estate is ready for that conversation, and our experience on projects of Presidential Tower’s scale has prepared us well for it.
Personally, I would like to teach, write, and mentor more. The studio has benefited immensely from the practice of articulating what we do and why — to clients, to juries, to the press — and I would like to share some of that learning with younger practices.
Q13. Finally, what piece of wisdom would you leave with aspiring designers who are just starting out?
Siddhina Sakla: Three things, if I may.
First, remember that this is a long game. The practices I admire most in India were built quietly, over decades, one well-delivered project at a time. You do not need to be everywhere in year one. You need to be excellent in year one.
Second, be honest. Be honest with your clients about what a space will cost and how long it will take. Be honest with yourself about what you are good at and what you still need to learn. Be honest with your team about credit and with your vendors about payment. An honest practice is, almost by default, a sustainable one.
Third, and most importantly, design for people, not for portfolios. The best compliment our studio has ever received was not an award or a magazine cover; it was a client saying their home finally sounded like them. If you can design spaces that make people feel more like themselves, the portfolio, publications, and recognition will follow. They always do.
Cover Image: Cedar Cane | Image Credit: The Arch Studio
Contributor
