There is a version of the average modern apartment building that has come to define urban India: the stacked-floor tower, maximised on every dimension, its floor plates repeated from the first storey to the final one with minor variation, its ground plane given over to parking or lift lobbies, with the communal and recreational areas pushed to the edges—and the people who live in it disconnected from what community living is actually meant to look like.
While it is an efficient product that works, efficiency and liveability are not the same thing. To the end-user, the gap between both is subdued under the guise of the latest amenities, location benefits, and unique floor plans. To builders and developers, this concern is hardly on top of the priority list when placed against chasing density targets and FSIs.
When the high-density formula is brought to large-scale high-end residences, the idea shifts from the highest number of units on one floor to the highest number of floors featuring one unit—commodifying privacy as the cost of premium living.
But privacy and community are not opposites that a project has to trade one for the other. The more interesting question is how apartment complexes can calibrate degrees of privacy—public, semi-public, semi-private, private—so that residents feel genuinely safe and known within a community, without feeling disconnected from the larger context of the city they inhabit.
Across our recent work, we have drawn three inferences that dictate a holistic design logic to create healthy residential ecosystems. By reevaluating a set of design decisions from the zoning and masterplan level to creating individual units that feel like part of a whole, we are rethinking residential typologies without alienating them from the modern Indian context.
Mixed-use programmes as an extension of the urban lifestyle
The conventional residential tower traps the living units into a silo of sorts, while mixed-use development compresses the recreational, entertainment, and leisure functions of a city into a walkable radius, bringing people into shared communal spaces and normalising gathering as a part of daily life.
M3M 65th Avenue in Gurugram is such an example: a campus combining premium living with high-street retail, recreation, and entertainment. Its 30,000 sq ft arrival plaza is built as a multi- functional space rather than a static entrance; on International Yoga Day 2026, the plaza filled with residents early in the morning, bringing the space to life with an unplanned use it was designed to absorb. That's the point of designing adaptable, pedestrianised plazas: one can’t predict every way a community will use a space, but one can design for the possibility.
A centralized layout that establishes safer communities
Most residential masterplans often place the recreational spaces at one corner of the plot, treating it as an amenity to visit rather than a place one can pass through regularly. In contrast, if we look at residential zones in European cities such as Barcelona, the apartments themselves
are very dense, but they are usually arranged around a central courtyard that multiplies casual interaction—one encounters neighbours, or has a place to sit outside without leaving the building, or can check out unknown visitors before they enter the premises.
Placing open space at the heart of the layout brings the landscape inwards, creating a relatively intimate space within familiar surroundings, increasing passive surveillance and security. This allows residents of all ages, such as children to explore the outside without being pushed to the edge of the plot. By extension, such planning also reduces the urban heat island effect, since the green core alleviates the heat from the main road traffic.
At Godrej Nature Plus in Sohna, this logic shapes the master plan directly. The parametric design for the clubhouse we designed here also works as a focal point that draws residents toward the heart of the project rather than away from it.
Bringing the ground level into the units
Stacking residences upward is great for density, but it detaches every resident above the first few floors from the ground-level landscape. The response is to break it into smaller, more legible increments and reintroduce them at each floor as open terraces.
At Saan Verdante, apartments taper through the building, with private terraces that extend usable outdoor space vertically. The development sets aside 85% of its land for landscaped and open areas, and each tower includes a sky lounge alongside ground-level amenities like landscaped recreational courts—giving residents a version of the outside at every level of the building.
Increasingly—and fortunately—clients and developers are starting to ask how a project will feel to inhabit, rather than only how it will perform financially. That shift in conversation creates room for design responses that go beyond the standard tower typology.
The more interesting work lies in taking the constraints of density seriously—land cost, FSI, infrastructure, unit count—and finding within them a spatial logic that restores what dense living tends to dissolve: the sense that your home has a specific identity, a relationship to its
surroundings, as well as a quality of quiet that belongs to you alone.
