A few years ago, my wife and me started construction of our house.
It took us around 3 months to find out what style of house we wanted to build. We did that by buying architecture magazines, browsing an American website named Houzz.com and even driving around nice places in Bangalore like Koramangla and Indiranagar and taking pictures of big, beautiful houses.
This was only the beginning of our struggle. Some of the challenges we faced
Long story short, we learnt a lot, starting from the time the foundation was laid to the time we selected the curtains. Some lessons were fun, some were painful, but learning we did, sometimes from friends .... sometimes from our mistakes.
Somewhere during this journey (new year's Goa trip and some Feni) it struck me like a bolt that I might not be the only one with this problem. There will be hundreds, thousands or lakhs of people facing the same challenges in this country with a modest population of 120 crores.
Like they say, every problem when looked at from the opposite side of the table is an opportunity. Then began the pursuit of building a solution for this mammoth problem/opportunity along with a group of like-minded and creative friends to take this quest forward.
Ullas Arjun
It took us around 3 months to find out what style of house we wanted to build. We did that by buying architecture magazines, browsing an American website named Houzz.com and even driving around nice places in Bangalore like Koramangla and Indiranagar and taking pictures of big, beautiful houses.
This was only the beginning of our struggle. Some of the challenges we faced
- Didn't know jack about House Styles
- Had unrealistic expectations from the space available
- Which Architect to approach for the design?
- Plenty of websites with American home designs but few with Indian designs
- Home design magazines cost about 100 Rs each, but have very few designs
- Materials selection : Not many public forums available for getting unbiased material selection guidelines
- Material pricing in hardware shops are not transparent and non-standardized
Long story short, we learnt a lot, starting from the time the foundation was laid to the time we selected the curtains. Some lessons were fun, some were painful, but learning we did, sometimes from friends .... sometimes from our mistakes.
Somewhere during this journey (new year's Goa trip and some Feni) it struck me like a bolt that I might not be the only one with this problem. There will be hundreds, thousands or lakhs of people facing the same challenges in this country with a modest population of 120 crores.
Like they say, every problem when looked at from the opposite side of the table is an opportunity. Then began the pursuit of building a solution for this mammoth problem/opportunity along with a group of like-minded and creative friends to take this quest forward.
Ullas Arjun
