Day Zero: No Office, No Portfolio, No Map
Varenyam Architecture & Design, the Lucknow-based firm I founded in [YEAR], began with three things: a laptop, a sketchbook I’d kept since before any of this started, and a portfolio so thin I hesitated to open it in front of strangers. I’m Shreyanshi Dubey, and this post, adapted from Chapter 3 of my book Roots & Skylines, is the founding story.
There was no office and no capital. There was a conviction about what rooms owe the people inside them, and little proof. The first client was never the hard part. A referral brought him, on trust that belonged to someone else, borrowed long enough to earn my own. The hard part is the second client, and the tenth. For years I lay awake asking how to win work on reputation rather than on someone else’s vouching.
What Does “Varenyam” Mean?
Varenyam (Sanskrit वरेण्यं, vareṇyaṃ) is a word from the Gayatri Mantra, tat savitur vareṇyaṃ, and means “worthy of seeking.” In the mantra it describes the divine light that deserves worship and one’s fullest attention. Varenyam Architecture & Design takes its name from that line. My mother chose it, and it names a standard rather than a style.
A style tells clients what the work will look like. A standard tells them how it will be approached: whether the people designing a space asked who lives there, what they need, and what the room will say to them at seven in the morning, before the day has started. Most spaces never ask. They answer a brief and call it finished. Varenyam was a commitment to ask every time, at every scale.
The Evening My Mother Named the Firm
My mother named Varenyam on an ordinary evening, after listening to me explain what I wanted to build: not the pitch, but the version where I was still mid-sentence, finding out what I believed as I said it.
She listened without hurrying me and without offering solutions I hadn’t asked for. When I ran out of words and the room went quiet, she said one word: Varenyam.
She didn’t need to explain it. The word fit exactly the thing I’d been failing to describe: the work was worth seeking, and deserved the best attention I could give. From that evening the name was also the measure.
An Unconventional Route Into Architecture
My route into architecture ran through the humanities: a bachelor’s degree in Political Science; four years of UPSC civil services preparation, during which I also completed a Master’s in Global Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi; a Master’s in Architecture from the University of Melbourne, completed in a hybrid model; and later a course in Architectural Imagination at Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Three moments made that route coherent. At Ambedkar, Professor Kaustubh Banerjee assigned a planning map and model of Delhi’s Motinagar; it was the first time I read a city as a system. Professor Amit Mishra, also at Ambedkar, pointed me toward the Harvard course that gave my instincts a language. And a summer of research on public healthcare infrastructure with the World Health Organisation, connected to Ayushman Bharat, put me in government hospital corridors, where an infrastructure problem first looked like a design problem.
Nothing arrived in sequence. I sought each piece out because the work was asking a question I couldn’t yet answer. That turned out to be clarity, not absence: everything I knew, I had earned because I needed it.
What Actually Matters at Day Zero of a Design Firm
A design firm at day zero needs two things more than an office or a logo: a standard it will hold every project to regardless of budget, and the honesty to admit that a standard is not yet a capability. The name gave Varenyam the first. The second took years and real mistakes.
A Standard Before a Structure
The standard came before any structure, by accumulation: years of noticing old buildings, neglected corridors, and the reason some rooms hold you while others don’t. The difference was almost never money or materials. It was attention. Heritage and modernity, emotion and function: these were tensions to work inside rather than resolve, because the best spaces carry both.
Our second project tested that. A young family’s two-bedroom home, interiors only, on a total budget of ₹5 lakh. A constraint that tight removes every option that was never really an option and leaves proportion, light, and how a colour behaves in one room at one hour. I loved the problem; it demanded an intelligence a generous budget never would.
Philosophy Without Execution Is Just Belief
Philosophy without execution is belief, and belief, however sincere, doesn’t make a room beautiful. What does is belief plus knowledge plus practice.
The gaps showed. I gave some clients what I thought they should want instead of what they needed. I made decisions on instinct without the technical knowledge to support them, and fixed the consequences mid-project. I focused so hard on the design that I forgot to manage communication, and clients felt uninformed in ways that damaged the relationship.
The first project had shown me the pace. A builder gave me a landscaping job on a secondhand recommendation, and I spent six months on work that warranted six weeks, learning that every decision in a space talks to every other. He remains one of the most constant presences in my professional life. Closing each gap, one at a time, turned a standard into something I could execute.
The Question I Still Ask Before Every Project
Before every Varenyam project, I ask one question: are we approaching this as something worthy of our best attention? Not only what the client wants, but what this space owes the people who will live, work, or pray inside it.
Budget doesn’t change the question: a ₹5 lakh interior and a ₹5 crore villa both deserve it. Neither does scale nor visibility; the project no one will photograph gets the same attention as the one that will be published.
That question has since been asked at Ram Dhanush in Ayodhya, at the Kalindi Floating Restaurant during Mahakumbh 2025, on Kartavya Path for NBCC, and at the Mastani Mahal restoration in Charkhari. Each is a chapter of its own. Not every day meets the standard. Every day, the question gets asked.
Shreyanshi Dubey is the founder of Varenyam Architecture & Design and the creator of HeritArch. She received the ACETECH 2025 Award and has been recognised as a Young International Leader. Her work spans heritage restoration, hospitality design, public installations and national infrastructure across India. Roots & Skylines is her first book.
Published [01-10-2026] · Last updated [01-10-2026]
