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The Interview: Total Environment’s Kamal Sagar on his 25-year mission to build the Apple of real estate

From apartments with version numbers to software that lets customers move walls to old-fashioned salespeople management, a peek into the architect who became the CEO

Rohin Dharmakumar, 24 Jul 2020

Total Environment began in 1996 as a ‘single product’ company, building small apartment communities in the 90s

Today, it not only builds massive communities and commercial spaces, it also has an in-house furnishing operation

Its vision is based on design—it even built a $3 million virtual design software platform to standardise and modularise its homes

Home design has turned out more important than ever; homes are now offices, play spaces, recreational spaces all rolled into one

This is the 25th year of existence for Total Environment, one of Bangalore’s most iconic apartment builders. Its signature exposed-brick and terrace garden apartments are as aspirational to potential home buyers as iPhones are to potential smartphone buyers. Like Apple’s products, Total Environment’s homes come at a premium too, ranging in price from Rs 1 crore ($125,000) to Rs 8 crore ($1.1 million).

Set up in 1996 by the architect couple of Kamal and Shibanee Sagar, Total Environment is a rather unique tree in the forest that is Indian real estate.

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Rohin Dharmakumar

Rohin is co-founder and CEO at The Ken. He holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta and an engineering degree in Computer Sciences from the R.V.C.E., Bangalore.

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The Interview: Total Environment’s Kamal Sagar on his 25-year mission to build the Apple of real estate