Nature belongs where people live
Every city is growing. Buildings are replacing open spaces, and concrete is slowly replacing nature. Yet above our homes, offices, schools and institutions lies an opportunity to bring life back—one rooftop, one courtyard and one community at a time.
To inspire, design and share knowledge that transforms everyday spaces into living ecosystems.
We work with people and communities, not just for them.
Every place is unique. We design with nature, culture and climate in mind.
We create landscapes that improve with time and leave a positive legacy.
We design living landscapes that reconnect people with nature, whether through rooftop gardens, urban green spaces or agroforestry. But our work is about more than creating beautiful places.
It is about creating healthier homes, cooler cities, richer biodiversity and stronger communities. Every project teaches us something. Every experiment becomes knowledge. Every story inspires the next landscape.
That is why CHAAS is not just a design practice. It is a growing Knowledge Centre for Living Spaces, where experience, research and storytelling come together to help more people create greener, healthier environments.
Our vision extends beyond rooftops. We believe every unused space has the potential to support life and every person can play a role in restoring the relationship between people and nature.
To inspire, design and share knowledge that transforms everyday spaces into living ecosystemsSix ideas that shape the way we think about a landscape — before it's installed, and long after.
What is the landscape expected to achieve?
A landscape should solve more than an aesthetic problem. At the Bharat Biotech campus, the requirement was very different from a conventional garden — it needed to reduce dust, stay low-maintenance, minimise insect attraction and remain pleasant for employees.
Species such as Conocarpus and Mahogany were chosen for their suitability to the site, and an efficient drip irrigation system was built, drawing water from nearly a kilometre away.
The plant was not the starting point. The problem was.
How will it perform over time?
A landscape can look beautiful the day it's installed. We look for what's often invisible in a finished one:
A landscape that requires constant intervention may not be a sustainable one — no matter how beautiful it looks.
Our own rooftop in Gajapati Nagar became a long-term experiment. Since 2016, it carried lawns, vegetables, ornamental plants, drainage systems and lightweight rooftop layers — and we watched how each changed over time.
After seven years, we removed the entire garden. Not because it failed. We wanted to know what was happening beneath the surface.
The garden disappeared. The evidence remained.
A project should leave behind more than a finished landscape — it should leave behind knowledge. A plant that behaves differently than expected teaches us something. So does an irrigation system that saves water, a drainage detail that performs well, or a failure.
Over time, these observations become a body of practical knowledge — the idea behind the CHAAS Living Laboratory.
Nature already knows how to grow. Our role isn't to replace it with technology — it's to understand natural systems better and design around them: how water moves, which plant suits the function, how irrigation can run more efficiently, what monitoring reveals inside a living system.
Science is not the opposite of nature. Used thoughtfully, it helps us work with it.
What happens after one year? After five? When conditions change?
We don't consider a landscape complete when the last plant goes in — that's when its real life begins. Plants mature, water needs shift, seasons and maintenance patterns change. Designing for the life of a landscape, not just its installation day, is central to how we work.
This is why we created the CHAAS Knowledge Centre — not to showcase completed projects, but to share what we learned from them.
"Where CHAAS arrives,
nature smiles."
Nature belongs where people live.