Karthikeyan Associates

Karthikeyan Associates is tucked away at 10, Valluvar Street Extension in Arumbakkam. It's a quiet enough street most of the time. We've been here long enough that the neighbors know who we are. The office is basically just a place for us to do our design work and meet with clients when they stop by. We handle a variety of structural tasks, mostly for residential projects around this part of town. There's usually a stack of drawings on the main table and someone on the phone talking to a builder. We don't really go in for fancy presentations or anything. It's more about getting the technical details sorted so the masons and laborers know what to do. Sometimes we have to go out to the sites in Arumbakkam or nearby to see how the foundation is looking. It's dusty work but someone has to do it. We use computers for the heavy lifting with the calculations, but we still keep a lot of notes by hand. It’s a small team here, so we all end up doing a bit of everything. There’s no big corporate ladder or anything like that. If you need something, you just ask. We try to be helpful and give honest answers about what can and can't be done with a building. It's a simple way to run a business, and it seems to work for us. Most days we are just happy to get through the pile of work on our desks.