Six steps. A floor plan and a line-item quote before you commit to anything. A schedule your priest, your planner and your photographer all hold a copy of. Nothing on your wedding day should be a decision.
Most decor enquiries end with a number and no drawing. Ours end with a drawing first — then the number, broken into lines you can actually argue with.
The order of work is deliberate. Ritual, then venue, then sightlines, then flowers. We find out what your priest needs and what your venue forbids before anybody talks about palettes, because those two facts decide more of the design than taste ever does.
You are never asked to imagine it. By the time you sign, you have seen the mandap in elevation, the room in plan, and a written direction for every function of the weekend.
This is the whole spine of the job, in order, with what you receive at each stage. Nothing here is held back for a sales call.
A call or a coffee. Which ceremonies, how many people, which venue, and — honestly — what the budget is. No moodboards yet. Just the shape of the weekend. If we are not the right studio for what you are planning, you will hear that here rather than in month four.
You get a moodboard, a palette and a written design direction for every function. If Friday is marigold and Sunday is plum, this is where we prove they belong to the same wedding. Most couples arrive with a Pinterest board full of contradictions; this stage exists to turn that into one coherent direction you can say yes to.
Floor plans drawn against the real venue dimensions, a mandap elevation, and a line-item quote. You see exactly what each element costs before you commit to any of it. Line items matter: they let you cut one thing you can live without instead of shrinking the whole idea by twenty per cent.
A signed agreement and a retainer hold your date. From here the design is ours to worry about — sourcing, fabrication, rentals, permits and the venue's load-in rules. We can hold a date informally for about a week while you decide; after that it goes back on the calendar.
We walk the venue with you, confirm every timing against the priest's muhurtham, and hand your planner and photographer a final schedule so nobody is guessing. Power drops, the width of the load-in door, where the truck parks, which lift reaches the ballroom — all of it gets written down thirty days early instead of discovered at six in the morning.
We load in, build, and stay on site through the function. When it is over we take everything down and leave the venue exactly as we found it. That part is included — it is usually a contractual requirement of the venue, and it is always ours to manage, not yours.
None of it is difficult. All of it is easier in month one than in week one — and every item on this list has, at some point, changed a design after it was drawn.
The whole thing, appendices included. Load-in windows, open-flame rules, what may touch the walls, whether anything at all can hang from the ceiling. That document quietly decides more of your design than your Pinterest board does. We would rather read it in month one than discover it at 6am on the day.
The muhurtham, and how long he needs in the space before it. Everything we build is scheduled backwards from that one number. A mandap that is finished at 9:40 for a 9:30 muhurtham has failed, however good it looks in the photographs afterwards.
Not the optimistic number, and not the one that keeps the peace at home. Guest count sets table layout, aisle width, how far back the last row sits, and therefore how tall the mandap has to be to read from there. Tell us the moment it moves.
A photograph of the actual fabric in daylight — not a screenshot of the boutique's listing. Screens lie about colour, and a gold that reads warm on a phone can go green against ivory drape. A two-inch swatch in the post is better than any photograph.
Planner, photographer, DJ, caterer, mehendi artist. We would rather email them in month two than meet them in a car park on the morning. Your photographer wants to know where the light falls on the mandap; your DJ needs to know what is behind the stage.
Every function, in order, with its venue and its start time. Friday Mehendi at the house, Saturday muhurtham at the hall, Sunday reception in the ballroom. Written down once so that nobody — including us — is working from memory.
The flowers come last. Ritual, then venue, then sightlines, then flowers. Change that order and you get a beautiful room that nobody can actually get married in.
Jyothsna Katari · Every detail matters.
Steps two, three and five are where a wedding is won or lost. The rest is admin and lifting.
A palette is not a mood — it is a set of decisions about how three different rooms, in three different kinds of light, will look like one wedding. Friday's Mehendi is lantern-lit and low. Saturday's muhurtham is often full daylight through a wall of windows. Sunday's reception is tungsten and darkness.
So we pick a connective colour — usually one flower and one metal — that appears in all three and let everything else move. Marigold on Friday can become amber glass on Sunday and still read as the same hand. What we will not do is paste the same backdrop into three rooms and call it consistency.
Venue marketing PDFs are optimistic. We measure — or we get the architectural plan — and we draw to that. Then we tape out the mandap footprint and stand at the back row, because a mandap that is beautiful from the third table and invisible from the twentieth is a design problem, not a photography problem.
An aisle needs to be wide enough for a bride in a heavy Kanjeevaram plus the people holding it. A priest needs room to sit, reach the fire and turn. Talambralu need somewhere for the rice to go. All of that is decided on paper, in week three, while it is still free to change.
We walk the venue with you and, wherever possible, with the banquet manager. Not to admire it — to measure the load-in door, find the power drops, check whether the service lift takes an eight-foot pillar, and learn where the truck is allowed to sit at half past five in the morning.
Then every timing is confirmed against the priest's muhurtham and a single schedule goes out to your planner, your photographer, your caterer and the venue. One document, one version, everybody working from the same page. By the time the day arrives there should be nothing left to decide.
Two real shapes of day, written the way we actually run them. Your schedule is built backwards from the muhurtham or the doors — never forwards from breakfast.
Banquet hall, 300 guests, muhurtham at 10:12am.
Ballroom, 400 guests, doors at 6:30pm.
Both of these are typical, not promised. A home Pellikuthuru compresses the whole thing into six hours; a three-day weekend runs a version of it every morning.
These do not appear as extras at the bottom of a quote. They are the job.
Every one of these has happened to somebody. None of them ruined a wedding, because each one has a plan attached to it long before the week of the event.
Hotels say it more often every year, and a Telugu wedding has fire at the centre of it. We read the contract in month one and go to the venue's fire officer rather than the sales manager — a sanctioned metal vessel, a sand tray and an extinguisher will usually pass where a loose diya will not. Everywhere the flame is decorative rather than ritual, it becomes LED, and it is chosen well enough that nobody at the third table can tell.
Then the structure has to carry itself. Free-standing rigging, weighted uprights, a canopy that takes its own load. It costs more and it takes longer to build, so it goes into the quote at week three — as a line you can see — instead of arriving as a change order in month eight.
Priests recalculate, and sometimes the answer changes. Every build is sequenced so the ceremony core — mandap, fire, family seating — is finished a clear forty-five minutes before the stated time. A shift of an hour or two is absorbed without anybody noticing. A move to a different day is a real conversation, but it is a conversation, not a catastrophe.
The wet plan is agreed at the walkthrough, not at six in the morning. A covered footprint is identified, marigold and mirror-work are specified to survive water anyway, and the platform is built so it can be hosed down. The call gets made by a fixed hour so your caterer, your photographer and your grandmother all hear it at the same time.
Banquet-hall turnarounds are brutal and they are rarely your fault. We pre-build off site, work in modular sections that go up in a fixed order, and size the crew to the window the contract actually gives us rather than the one we would like. If the window shrinks, the flowers still go on last — that order is what protects them.
Centrepieces and seating scale easily. A mandap does not, and neither does an aisle. Tell us the day you know: the layout gets redrawn, the quote gets revised in writing, and you approve it before anything is ordered. Nothing is ever added to your invoice without you seeing it first.
Send the dates, the venue if you have one, and which ceremonies you are planning. You will hear back within one working day — and there is no charge for the concept discussion.