An interior design company · Chennai
We design commercial and residential interiors in Chennai, and we build them ourselves. One team from the first measurement to the day you get the keys back.
How a room begins
Nothing gets built here until it has been drawn, costed and agreed. The line comes first, then the colour, then the room. Scroll to watch it happen.
A single line
Illustration of the process, not a project
Selected work
A faceted wall of blue and white triangles gives a plain floor plate one thing worth looking at, and the rest of the office stays quiet behind it. Glass partitions keep the daylight moving through the whole depth of the floor. Linear light is run as one continuous line so the ceiling reads clean.
A homeware and clothing store where the product is the colour, so the shop had to stay pale and let it carry. Rattan pendants warm the ceiling, a timber counter anchors the back wall, and an arched door in green marks the way through. The mural was drawn to match the label's own hand.
Also delivered
Healthcare · Arumbakkam, Chennai
One room inside Vasanthi Orthopaedic Hospital, turned into a physiotherapy floor. Warm timber underfoot, white above it, and nothing else competing for a patient's attention.
Education · Chengalpattu
Classrooms and corridors for a new campus. Pinboard set into the wall at the height a child can actually reach, timber pegboard beneath it, and finishes chosen to survive several hundred pairs of feet a day.
The studio
Most of what goes wrong in an interior job happens in the gap between the person who drew it and the person who built it. Pencil Studio closes that gap by doing both. The drawing is made by people who know what it costs to build, and the site is run by the people who drew it.
We work across clinics, offices, shops, campuses and homes. A civil engineer walks every job. You get one number to call, and one company answerable for the result.
18
Projects in the book
12
Built on site
6
Sectors worked in
10
Stages to handover
What we do
Nothing here is subcontracted out and forgotten about. We price it, we draw it, we build it, we snag it.
Space planning, palette and detail, worked out on paper until the room is right.
Design and delivery under one roof, so the drawing and the site never drift apart.
Clinics, offices, campuses and shops, planned around how the space is really used.
Full renovation including civil work, flooring, plumbing and electrical lines.
Cove and profile lighting, coffered ceilings, panelling, wardrobes and kitchens.
Plans, elevations and interior views, so you can read the space before it is built.
On site
Palavanthangal, Chennai
A terrace turned into an office. These are our own site photographs, taken during the work rather than after it. We publish them because execution is half of what you are buying, and because a studio that only shows finished rooms is showing you half a service.
Every site photograph
Strip out
Terrace steel
Partitions
Handover
How we work
Your brief out of your head and onto paper. Who uses the space, how they move through it, and roughly what you want to spend.
We measure the space as it is, not as the builder's drawing says it is. Walls, levels, beams, existing services.
Where walls go, how people circulate, where the daylight lands. Given to you as options, not as one idea defended.
Palette, finishes and the quality of light, chosen against the brief. A clinic should read calm. A shop should read bright.
The design drawn up before anyone cuts anything. Changing a drawing costs a morning. Changing a built wall costs a week.
Elevations, sections, ceiling plans, electrical and plumbing layouts, and a joinery detail for every built-in piece.
Every material named, then quantified. No line that just says false ceiling without saying which system and how much of it.
Civil, ceiling, carpentry, electrical, plumbing and paint, sequenced by us, with a civil engineer walking the job.
We write down everything that is not right, however small, and close it before we ask you to accept the space.
Spaces settle. We stay reachable through the defects period set out in your contract.
“Colour was chosen so that a patient would recognise the kind of care on offer before anyone spoke to them.”
“A room that has to be explained has already failed. It should simply feel like the obvious thing to have done.”
The register
Delivered but not photographed to a standard we would publish. Ask and we will walk you through any of them.
Questions
Start
Send the floor plan if you have one, or just the address and what you want to do with it. We will come and measure it ourselves before we quote anything.