Studio — since 2008
A small architecture studio in Colombo, since 2008
Design Republic is a Colombo studio building honest architecture for its place and climate. We combine seventeen years of houses, hotels, factories and community work with a slow, deliberate way of designing, learning from the land before we open a drawing.
Our story
The studio started in 2008, in a single room off Stratford Avenue. Sanjeewa had just left a larger practice and wanted to work differently. Smaller jobs, deeper attention, the chance to draw every detail himself.
Seventeen years later the work has grown wider but the studio has stayed deliberately small. Homes in Colombo, factories in the dry zone, a hotel on the Galle coast, a school in Kalpitiya, shrine rooms for temples that wrote to us without a budget.
The practice
We work across architecture, interior design, landscaping, and urban and master planning, for private clients, corporates and NGOs. Every brief is a balance between function and aesthetics, context, climate, material, cost and time. We try to resolve it with clarity of form, transparency of space and a clearly articulated structure.
Vision
Buildings that get better with weather, that settle into their place, and that do not ask their occupants to live differently than they already want to live.
Approach
How we design
slowness01
Time as a material.
Drawings take time. Site decisions take longer. We have never delivered our best work in a hurry, so we no longer pretend that we can.
place02
Add to the land, never shout over it.
Every plot has a personality before we arrive. We try to add to it without shouting over it. Sometimes that means a courtyard. Sometimes it means stepping back and doing less.
climate03
Monsoon, heat, salt air, dust.
Sri Lanka makes its own demands. Monsoon, heat, salt air, dust from the hills. We design with these in mind from the first sketch, not as an afterthought once the form is set.
the long view04
Designed for the thirtieth year.
A building has to work for the people who will live in it for thirty years, not for the photograph taken on handover day. We design for that thirtieth year.
the studio06
There are six of us. We share a single room, one kettle, and the responsibility for every drawing that leaves the studio. Led since 2008 by founder and managing director Sanjeewa Lokuliyana, an Associate Member of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects, with a BSc (Hons) in Built Environment and an MSc in Architecture from the University of Moratuwa.
Founder
Sanjeewa Lokuliyana
Founder and managing director, since 2008
- Associate Member, Sri Lanka Institute of Architects
- BSc (Hons) in Built Environment, University of Moratuwa
- MSc in Architecture, University of Moratuwa
- SLIA Annual Sessions 2017, Members’ Exhibition Merit Award
Clients
Some of the people and companies we have worked for. Many of them have come back a second and third time, which is the only metric we really track.
AlsoHirdaramani · Nestlé · UNFPA · Marks & Spencer · James Finlay · Port City BPO · Statesman Hats
Awards
We do not enter many competitions. These are the ones the work has been kind enough to win.
- LEED Platinum, new construction
- Global best practice in sustainable construction
- Merit Award, most innovative display panel
