H. Dipak & Company, a renowned Jewellery Business House in Mumbai, India, needed to expand their existing office building, to add various other departments to their business. The existing building housed their Diamond Polishing & Cutting Departments but they needed to add a Jewellery Creative Design Research & Development Department, for which they needed two additional floors to be added to the building.
The existing building had a large floor plate which lacked natural light and ventilation. The new design for the additional floors of the building took care of this by a three-pronged approach – creating a setback from the facade, thereby forming a front terrace garden, designing a courtyard on the second floor, and incorporating a private terrace at the rear end of the building.
These design changes in the form of the building allowed us the freedom to have large spanned spaces while achieving good natural light quality. The space was planned as an open office to allow for easy interaction between the team members. These terraces and courtyards were designed in collaboration with a landscape design studio to form informal sitting areas for the people to take a break, have meals and so on.
The construction technology adapted for the building was steel and deck slab, which was used to reduce the load on the existing building. The material palette used is mainly glass, steel, exposed concrete rendering, and exposed brick cladding. Cladding the building was a conscious choice to reduce the weight of the facade.
