From Somerset to Rajasthan, ‘global, hyperlocal’ is how distinctive practice Studio Saar operates – thanks to its industrial backing and the impetus of its founders
Not many architectural practices are part of an industrial titan. But Studio Saar is one. Based in the Somerset town of Frome and the city of Udaipur in Rajasthan, India, it is the partnership of Jonny Buckland and Ananya Singhal, who met as undergraduates.
It has a highly unusual range of interests thanks to its founders, from running a circuit board factory in India to masterplanning a community-led settlement on its UK doorstep. ‘We’re a confusing practice,’ laughs Singhal. ‘Incredibly small with massive projects.’
I meet the pair just after a strategy day, and not long after the Mayday Saxonvale social enterprise secured ownership of the post-industrial site where more than 260 new homes will be built – next to the old Silk Mill that is Studio Saar’s base. They are buzzing with ideas about urban work, retrofit and the places they care so much about. ‘We are very local practices in India and Frome: a global, hyperlocal firm,’ enthuses Singhal.
I am swept up with the enthusiasm and energy as we perch in the practice’s well-decked-out workshop (‘the meeting room is tricky – you all have to get up if someone needs the loo,’ confides Singhal later). The detail comes from Buckland, with care and attention, and the odd flash of dry humour, while Singhal’s infectious optimism sets the tone. He is over in the UK once a month. ‘I don’t get jet lag,’ he says, expanding on this to add: ‘I don’t get hangovers.'
From award-winning public buildings to agricultural projects
But we must backtrack to understand how this singular firm came to be. When Buckland and Singhal finished their Part 1, they went their separate ways, Buckland carrying on through to his Part 3 through work at FCB Studios and AHMM, then onto humanitarian architecture.
Singhal returned to his family firm Secure Meters, which makes electric meters that are used across the world, as Singhal’s father stepped back and he took on a new leadership role. The two came together again briefly, extending a family home in Hampshire.
As the two of them talk now about a recent Rajasthan agricultural project, Cowshed (2024), you can see the synergy. Buckland introduces it in a deadpan way, setting up the joke: ‘It is a brief for an animal, a herd.’ And Singhal follows up with the punchline: ‘We haven’t had anyone come for user interviews yet.’
Roll forward to 2015 and to Third Space, an ambitious Udaipur public building, with Singhal’s sister as philanthropic client. Singhal wanted to be involved, but needed help. So Buckland joined him, leaving his own nascent practice, and spent six months in India on the project.
Third Space is spatially and materially inventive with a cool pool at its heart, a facade screen of marble cutouts, and above the atrium, woven cane sales for shading. Dezeen chose it as its most significant building for 2023.
It was an intense build, not without issues. The site culture was reactive and accompanied by people ‘screaming at each other’. Singhal set up Saturday lunches for labourers and their families, taking time to listen to their troubles. At the same time, he and Buckland worked on Secure Sanand, a factory in Gujurat, and its curving recreation centre. ‘It was 16-hour days,’ Singhal recalls.
Singhal tells how, during this time, he separated from his wife and found the headspace for the idea of a practice. And so in 2021, Studio Saar was founded, as a Secure Meters subsidiary. ‘It’s become a thing,’ says Singhal joyfully.
In India, the practice of 20 is ‘incredibly challenged’ by the amount of work it has for Secure, for the family and for the trust that runs Third Space. It is also setting up an urban planning team to inform the people of Udaipur about their city and its possibilities, for example through its secret step wells project – locating the wells that were traditionally used for marriages and festivals, as places to learn to swim or for women to relax.
The practice is analysing them, looking at what conservation they need and how to make them financially sustainable. ‘It is a Doshi kind of sense of responsibility,’ says Singhal, referring to the RIBA Royal Gold Medallist, Balkrishna Doshi. ‘From a long-term perspective that [planning work] will be a more important legacy than the things we have built.'
On the UK studio’s part, there is one Secure fit-out project and some housing in Tamil Nadu. But the small team has been kept busy with the network in Frome and around the South West, thanks initially to the contacts of the owners of the Silk Mill Studios and loyal collaborators.
‘We don’t get phone calls out of the blue – it’s all coming from our connections and networks,’ says Buckland. The studio does, though, invest to develop new areas, from its idea of a repurposed department store in Taunton as a community space which won the £10,000 Davidson Prize to its work on the Mayday Saxonvale scheme.
Bringing together UK expertise and Indian stone
On the books in the UK, Studio Saar has an art club, reworking a listed manor house, concept ideas for a regenerative enterprise, Higher Farm, and some housing in Devon. There is also the exciting prospect of a collaboration on the Mayday Saxonvale scheme – though that is not a given, despite all the work that has been sunk into securing outline planning consent on the compelling new quarter with housing, makers, a lido and space for an expanded school.
They are modest projects, alongside some loss-making ones. So how does it work financially? ‘It would be impossible to be in a position where this firm is always making a loss,’ Singhal explains. ‘We do enough for Secure to break even. The fee for any other work goes straight to the bottom line.’
We want to work on projects that move the story of architecture, solving complicated problems in novel ways
Yet the vision is a bigger one. ‘We want to work on projects that move the story of architecture,’ he continues. ‘We want to work with clients who financially can’t work with architects, to be architects solving complicated problems in novel ways and changing the way architecture is practiced. All that is helped by the fact we are supported by Secure, and the rest of work for prime clients. It enables us to do things we might not be able to otherwise.’
One novel way is by marrying up UK-based expertise – engineering firm Webb Yates, and the Stonemasonry Company – with the many quarries near Udaipur. Secure’s new printed circuit board (PCB) factory will have a stone staircase cantilevering out on both sides as it wraps around a stone wall, one for the outgoing shift of workers, the other for the incoming shift. Corbelled stone roofs, over the toilets and guard house, will be an investment in skill and learning, with the stone itself relatively cheap.
Quarry waste also makes it into a number of Studio Saar’s buildings as aggregate in the concrete. ‘We want to show the world, or India, that building with stone is possible and cost effective,’ says Singhal.
In the UK, the firm is preparing for growth, reworking its space and building a warm culture with a larger team. Leaving the Frome studio, Singhal hugs each colleague before he hops into a car – and his driver whisks him off to the airport.
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