Inside Harkaran Boparai’s Wellness-Driven Architecture Practice Shaping Luxury Homes Globally

When Harkaran Boparai founded his architecture studio in 2017, he set out to answer one question: how will this space hold the person within it—even before a floor plan is drawn, before a material is selected? 

The practice, headquartered in Vasant Vihar, New Delhi, with offices in Dubai and Amritsar, has completed over 70 projects and won 14 international awards. The work is primarily residential— large private houses in South Delhi and the UAE, including Villa Creek Marina, Villa Morena, and Naukuchiatal Di Palais, alongside gurudwaras, commercial interiors, and the studio’s own flagship space, which functions as a working demonstration of the principles behind everything else. A team of over 100 works across architecture, interiors, landscape, and furniture design— and handles execution in-house, from design to completion— bound by a single philosophy: wellness-oriented architecture.

The residential projects gravitate toward the expansive, drawing on a contemporary classical language. Rooms open in sequence rather than all at once, making movement through the space intuitive. Morning light reaches deep into the rooms; harsher afternoon light is filtered before it gets inside. Shadows are kept, not eliminated, giving rooms depth and a sense of time passing. Materials are selected for how they behave over years—how stone and wood absorb sound, how surfaces respond to touch, how things age. A house designed in this fashion, Boparai believes, doesn’t need to be redone every few years. It stays relevant because it was built around how people actually live rather than a moment in taste. Sustainability, in this framework, is a consequence of durability rather than a design directive.

Gurudwara commissions—Boali Sahib, Patna Sahib, Mandi Sahib— present a different problem. A private house is designed around one household, its rhythms and habits known in advance. A place of worship has to absorb hundreds of people across different times of day, different occasions, different states of mind. The brief doesn’t allow for the kind of spatial calibration that defines the residential work. Instead, Boparai pulls back—letting light, volume, and proportion carry the experience—trusting that the same principles that make a room livable make a large space navigable. The architecture recedes. What remains is the effect. 

This intentionality in making stems from Boparai’s foundational core. Trained at Guru Nanak Dev University and shaped by early mentorship under architect Reza Kabul, Boparai describes his practice as rooted in Indian culturalism but made, in his words, for the world. Wellbeing, in Boparai’s work, is not located in any single decision. It accumulates in how a corridor turns, how a ceiling height changes, how a room is sized to allow stillness. It is, in the end, architecture you feel before you understand it.