Build to understand.
Two thousand metres up, on a shoulder of hillside above Manali, the deodar opens into a clearing. Below, the town flickers awake at dusk; above, a single snow peak holds the last of the light.
This is where we built a working studio, a maker's lab: benches, machines, drawings, screens, a wood stove. Our practice runs on one conviction: you cannot design for a place you have not lived in. We came to the mountain to build, and let the building teach us the mountain.
A workshop wants one thing. A mountain wants another.
A workshop is an honest, industrial thing. It wants power, dust extraction, hard-wearing surfaces, heat. A Himalayan hillside is a poem: snow, pine, thin cold air, light that travels all day.
Most mountain buildings resolve the tension by surrendering: they become sealed boxes that keep the cold out and the view with it, or glass pavilions that frame the peaks and freeze the people inside. We wanted neither. How do you make a space rugged enough to build in, and open enough to never forget where it stands?
Altitude sets the terms.
The room had to hold heat through hard winters, span wide enough for an open working volume, and survive years of tools, movement and weather. Local craftsmen are masters of timber but rarely of steel and glass.
Materials that travel are expensive; materials that belong, stone, slate, Himalayan pine, are everywhere, if you design with them. And we were building far from home, learning a new craft culture on site, in real time, by hand.
Let both natures cohabit, honestly.
A pitched ceiling of local pine, warm, shaped by hands that have worked this timber for generations, is braced by an exposed steel truss, painted a deliberate signal red. The industrial bones of a workshop aren't hidden. They're the room's signature.
Underfoot, slate and stone: durable, and heavy with the thermal mass to carry the day's warmth into the night. At the centre, a cast-iron bukhari: heat, and ritual. Plywood built-ins, plan chests, standing benches, a laser bed, keep the maker's tools close and the floor clear. And at each gable, a great framed window turns the peaks and the valley into the studio's fifth wall.
You learn a place by building in it.
The building taught us the mountain: how it holds cold in stone, how the light swings from blue to gold across a working day, how a craftsman in Manali reads a timber joint.
It taught us ourselves, too. A workspace is never neutral; it shapes how you think. Leaving the structure and the tools in plain sight keeps a room feeling alive, mid-thought. And form follows human stopped being a slogan. It meant designing for the maker at the bench at 4pm in January.
Form follows passion. Even at two thousand metres.
HYMA Studio hums. It is where the practice comes to build ideas and test them in the round, where a drawing becomes a thing you can hold. Red steel, pine, slate, snow. A working proof of what we believe: that architecture is the most honest way we have of getting to know a place, and the people who will live in it.