Music For Your Eyes

Kamal Sagar, MD, Total Environment, blends music and an architect’s mind to bring to life architecture that make for better living

- Jayashree Kini Mendes

Timeless. Craftsmanship. One with nature. These are just some of the principles that the team at Total Environment embraces. Dig a little deeper and one is curious to know more about the beneficial values that have been carefully nurtured and cultivated within the company. It begins with Kamal Sagar, founder and chairman. By his own admission, he prefers to imbue his homes with functionality, space and humanism, and the architect and musician in him has honed this through a combination of technology and housecraft. And this is visible across every aspect of his body of work.

Sagar did not mean to start out as a developer. That role was nowhere on the horizon. All that the architect from IIT Kharagpur, along with his architect wife Shibanee, wanted to do was create homes that were a far cry from what he saw around him. Finding little acceptance, Sagar took matter in his own hands and founded Total Environment, a construction and real estate development company, which he says “would build out my designs without compromise”.

The grit to construct memorable buildings comes from his admiration for works by Moshe Safdie’s ‘Habitat’ in Montreal and Charles Correa’s ‘Kanchenjunga Apartments’ in Mumbai. Otherwise, he thinks that little has been achieved worldwide in architectural design with respect to multi-family housing.