The studio — est. 2011
Good design isn’t added on. It’s the point.
Design Matters is an architecture and interior design studio in Indiranagar, Bengaluru. Since 2011 we have designed private residences, apartment interiors, workplaces and hospitality spaces across the city — work that ranges in scale but not in attention.
The name is the position. In a city building faster than it can think, we hold that the difference between a building and a place worth inhabiting is design — considered early, argued over properly, and carried through to the last drawer detail.
That conviction has quietly built one of the strongest client records among Bengaluru firms — most of our work still arrives by referral, and the studio has been recognised with Best of Houzz service awards three years running.
The philosophy
“Design isn’t what we add to a building. It’s everything we refuse to leave out — light, air, proportion, and the way a home holds the people in it.”
— Ar. Kiran Hanumaiah, Principal Architect
Principal architect
Ar. Kiran Hanumaiah
Kiran holds a Bachelor’s in Architecture from B.M.S. College of Engineering, Bengaluru, and a Master’s from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. Across more than two decades in architecture, interior and product design, he has built a practice defined by range — and by the patience to get the small things right.
Before founding Design Matters in 2011, he spent twelve years as senior associate architect at Team-2 Architects and Engineers, running projects of widely varying scale and complexity — an apprenticeship in the unglamorous disciplines that make buildings actually happen: coordination, costing, and site.
The team
8 architects
01
Ar. Harshitha
02
Ar. Keerthana
03
Ar. Pallavi VK
04
Ar. Maitri Shah
05
Ar. Jerin Sabu
06
Ar. Reshma
07
Ar. Mrudula
08
Ar. Shefreen
How we work
01
Listen before drawing
A brief is more than a room count. We start with how you live and work — the routines, the rituals, the things you didn't know to ask for — and let the plan grow from there.
02
Design for this climate
Bengaluru rewards buildings that breathe. Orientation, shading, cross-ventilation and honest materials do the heavy lifting long before any machine has to.
03
Detail is the design
The junction of two materials, the depth of a reveal, where the light lands at four in the afternoon — the small decisions are the ones you live with daily, so we sweat them.
04
Stay through the build
Drawings don't build houses; follow-through does. We stay involved from the first site visit to handover, so what gets built is what was designed.
Work with the studio
Tell us about your project.
A sentence or two is plenty — we’ll reply within a working day. Prefer to talk it through?