.png
)
India’s Creative Economy Just Got a Room of Its Own
As India cements its place in the global orange economy, a sector worth over ₹166 lakh crore built on creativity, culture, and intellectual property, one Pune-based design studio asks a simple question: shouldn't the spaces where ideas are made look like they mean it? Hoot At Sight, a Pune-based firm, builds The Creative Room for Ideamint, a 2,200 sqft studio in Pune that wears its ideology in orange.
- Project’s name: The Creative Room
- Project’s Typology: Commercial Project
- Location: Law College Road, Pune, Maharashtra [India]
- Area: 2200 sqft
- Date of Completion: February 2026
- Design Firm: Hoot At Sight
- Founders: Akshay Gadkari, Saili Gadkari
- Firm’s Location: Pune, Maharashtra [India]
- Website: hootatsight.com
- Socials: Instagram || Facebook
- Photographer: apstudioworks [Anish Padalkar]
- Stylist: The Soul Concept
- Text: Tanushree Saluja
- List of Brands: Nexion Tiles , BenQ India, Yellow Furniture Store, Artkoat Surfaces, Merino Laminates, Hafele India
The Creative Room is Hoot At Sight's answer to that contradiction. The workspace on Law College Road, Pune, designed for Ideamint, a fast-growing creative advertising firm, is a studio built from the inside out: around how creative people actually think, move, collaborate, and occasionally need to disappear. Completed in February 2026, four months after possession, and delivered by Pune-based architects Akshay and Saili Gadkari, the project makes a considered architectural argument: if you are in the business of ideas, your building should say so.
Akshay frames it simply, “a creative firm lives and dies by the quality of its ideas, so the question the architects kept returning to was - what does a building look like that actually believes that.” This argument was embedded in the existing structure itself. The bare shell arrived with absurd, angular geometry, and rather than resist it, the design leaned in, introducing deliberate curves as a language across the raised deck, ceiling, and walls, composing an intriguing amalgamation of materials and moods. A structural toilet block was removed in compliance with Vastu principles, freeing the plan from its most rigid corner. From that point, the architecture stopped insisting on order and simply began to flow.
OPENING UP | Spatial Strategy and the Hill-View Advantage
With the structural constraints resolved, the design logic settled quickly: keep the centre open and fluid, raise a casual collaborative zone towards the glass facade, and let the uninterrupted hill views of Law College Road do the rest. A conference room is pocketed behind the reception, parallel to the lined-up workstations. A sleek glass door framed within a sweeping curved archway separates the two dissolving the boundary between private and open. The cabins, minimal in number per the client's insistence, are oriented toward the green hillscape that defines this part of Pune, offering moments of genuine solitude for high-stake decisions. There is no urban din here, no traffic noise bleeding through the glass. In a city often defined by its density, this address delivers something rare: the quiet that serious creative work demands.
The client's brief was more a spatial manifesto than a technical document: no meeting rooms where ideas go to be approved, just an environment where they are born. The central zones honour that instinct directly. Workstations, informal seating clusters on a slightly raised deck, and an open pantry flow into one another without hard boundaries, while the glazed perimeter keeps natural light moving through the core all day, making the studio feel larger and more alive than its footprint might suggest.
The standout feature is a large communal wooden table on a raised deck adjacent to the pantry, an element never specified in the brief, yet has since become the studio's most defining one. As the Ideamint team puts it, they never wanted a room where ideas go to be approved. This is that table: the place where a casual chai conversation escalates, almost without warning, into a flow-state.
Dipped in the same soul, the studio's most arresting element is the bespoke creative wall, conceived and executed by Hoot At Sight's own Creative Head. At once artwork and spatial anchor, it declares Ideamint's ideology immediately.
MIND-FULL-NESS | Details That Earn Their Keep
Among the space's most functionally intelligent decisions is the open pantry at the plan's social centre, a deliberate inversion of the usual break-room logic that hides the kitchen at the periphery. At the diagonally opposite end of the floor plate, a calling booth provides acoustic privacy for focused calls and individual work, giving the mind a place to land when the open plan asks too much of it. Together, the open pantry and phone booth represent two of the strongest emerging trends in progressive workspace design, and their pairing reflects the practice's understanding that a truly well-designed office anticipates the full spectrum of how creative people actually work.
CONTAGIOUS ENERGY | What the Founders Brought to the Build
"The Creative Room was built the way good things usually are: with the founders fully in it. Akshay and Saili were present through every phase, their energy and optimism becoming as much a part of the finished space as the materials they selected", remarks the client. The final two weeks saw the entire Hoot At Sight team on-site, pushing to meet the promised handover date sustained by what the architects describe simply as endless rounds of chai, vada pav, and pizza boxes. The deadline was met. The project was delivered in four months flat.
That spirit, collaborative, generous, and urgently attentive to quality, is perceptible in the finished space in ways that resist easy description. Visitors to the studio consistently remark on something that cannot be written into a brief or measured in a drawing: a warmth, a sense of welcome, a feeling that the people who built this space genuinely wanted to be here. The positivity of the founders is, quite simply, felt.
.jpg)
