Simple Elegance

Urban Architectural Collaborative (UA Lab) employs clean lines, custom detailing and a well-thought-out material palette to make their compact 670-square-foot space in Ahmedabad — which serves as a home and work studio — appear spacious and airy.

- Sanjukta Nandy

When young architects Vipuja and Krushnakant Parmar wanted to buy an apartment, the key design points they listed while choosing the property were the airflow orientation and natural inflow of light into the space. After scouting for the right space, they found one that met their requirements — a 670-square-foot 2BHK apartment on the eighth floor of a building in south Bopal, Ahmedabad — where ample breeze wafted through from the south-west and copious natural light flooded the space. They also eventually decided to convert part of their residence into a studio space that they could work out of.

Vipuja says, “Our concerns regarding design are the same but our approaches are different. Krushnakant has a keen eye for detail and material exploration, hence his design strategy begins from a part to the whole, while mine works inversely on a macro level.” After graduating from the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology, Vipuja did her masters in urban design while Krushnakant veered towards architectural practice. Having worked with different architectural firms for over seven years, the couple set up their young practice, Urban Architectural Collaborative (UA Lab), in 2014, which features a compact team and is based out of the studio set up in their residence.