Designing for Ambition: The Unilazer Ventures Office, Mumbai
When the brief is to build a workspace that feels like a company at the top of its game, every decision — from the entrance sequence to the material palette — has to carry that confidence. Here is how we built it.
A commercial office interior is one of the hardest briefs to get right. The client — Ronnie Screwvala, founder of UTV and UpGrad — knew exactly what he wanted: a workspace that felt energetic, considered, and built to last. Not a trend. Not a statement. A place where good work happens, and where the building itself communicates the quality of the organisation inside it.
The Entrance Sequence
The first decision was the entrance. Too many commercial interiors treat the lobby as dead space — a transition zone you pass through on the way to the real office. Here, we made it the beginning of a sequence. The reception desk, the lighting, the ceiling treatment — each one sets a tone that the rest of the space then develops. By the time you reach the primary workspace, you already understand what kind of organisation this is.
Material Palette
We kept the palette restrained: stone, timber, and a single accent material used with precision. The instinct in commercial interiors is often to do too much — to signal ambition through complexity. The better approach, we find, is the opposite. Restraint reads as confidence. The materials we chose age well and look richer over time, which matters for a long-term workspace.
The result is an office that feels like it belongs to the organisation using it — not a generic workspace that could be anywhere, but a specific place built for a specific kind of ambition.