Architectural Design
in Islamabad & Rawalpindi

A design package is not a single pretty floor plan — it is a coordinated set of drawings that carries your project from an idea to a build a contractor can price and pour. When we talk about architectural design at DevPro, we mean the whole set, produced in a deliberate sequence so each layer builds on the one before it and nothing has to be redrawn twice.

1. Concept design and floor plans

We start with your brief, your plot and its orientation, and turn those into a concept — the room programme, how the spaces flow, where the stairs and services sit, and how the house presents to the street. Two rounds of revisions are built in, because this is the stage to move a wall while it is still a line on a page rather than a poured column. The output is a set of scaled floor plans for every level, along with elevations and sections that fix the heights and roof.

2. 2D working drawings

Once the layout is locked, we produce dimensioned working drawings — the plans, elevations and sections a site team actually builds from, with door and window schedules, levels and setting-out dimensions. These are the drawings the mason and the site engineer read every morning, so they have to be unambiguous.

3. 3D visualisation

We render the exterior — and, where you want it, the key interior spaces — in 3D so you can see the house before you commit to it. This is where clients catch things a plan hides: the proportion of a facade, the way a boundary wall reads, whether a lounge feels as open as they imagined. Deciding here costs nothing; deciding after the plaster is on costs a demolition.

4. Structural drawings

Our engineers translate the architecture into a structural set — foundation and footing layouts, column and beam schedules, slab reinforcement details and the rebar grade, size and spacing for each element. In an active seismic region this is not a formality; it is what keeps the house standing, and it is where the covered area you have drawn becomes a real load path.

5. MEP drawings

Mechanical, electrical and plumbing layouts — power points and distribution, lighting, the plumbing runs and drainage, and provisions for HVAC — are drawn onto the plans so the conduiting and sleeves get cast into the grey structure at the right moment rather than chased into finished walls later. Coordinated MEP is one of the quiet differences between a smooth build and a messy one.

6. BOQ hand-off

Finally the drawings feed a Bill of Quantities — the itemised schedule of materials and quantities that turns a design into a priced build. A real BOQ can only exist once the drawings do; before that, any number is a guess. If you are new to the term, our plain-English guide to what a BOQ is explains how it works, and you can run the resulting areas through our construction cost calculator for Islamabad & Rawalpindi. Design itself is quoted per project scope and size — contact us for a design quote.

In the twin cities you cannot legally build until the authority that controls your plot approves your map — and it will only approve a drawing set that meets its bylaws. A design that ignores those rules gets rejected, sent back for rounds of corrections, and stalls your project for weeks before a single truck of sand arrives. We draw to the standard from the start.

Which authority stamps your map depends on where the plot sits. CDA governs Islamabad's older sectors — the F, E and G series and similar; RDA covers much of Rawalpindi and its private schemes; and the large private societies run their own engineering directorates — DHA Islamabad–Rawalpindi through its Engineering Directorate, and Bahria Town, Gulberg Greens, B-17, Capital Smart City and Blue World City each through their own approval offices. Every one of them wants the map submitted as a proper drawing set, not a sketch.

A map-approval set typically has to contain the site or plot plan with setbacks and orientation, dimensioned floor plans for every level, elevations and sections showing heights, a covered-area statement demonstrating the plot stays within the permitted ground-coverage limit, structural drawings, and the services layouts — all prepared to that authority's bylaws on setbacks, height, ground coverage and boundary-wall rules. On DHA plots, for example, ground coverage is commonly capped around 60–65%, and the drawings must prove the design respects it. We prepare that set to the relevant authority's bylaws and submit it on your behalf, then support you through the fees and any security deposit. Approval timelines vary by authority and by how complete the documentation is, so we keep the file moving rather than quote a fixed number.

Deviating from an approved map is the expensive trap: an extra covered room, an encroached setback or an over-height wall can trigger a stop-work or demolition notice and hold up your completion certificate. Design it right, get it stamped, and build to the stamp.

A design that works in the twin cities is drawn for the twin cities — its sun, its seismic risk and the plot sizes people actually build on here. Generic drawings pulled off the internet ignore all three, and the cost shows up later in comfort, safety and wasted space.

Orientation and sun

Islamabad and Rawalpindi run hot in summer, so how a house faces the sun matters. We orient living spaces and openings to work with the light rather than against it, shading west-facing glazing and placing bedrooms and lounges to stay comfortable through the hottest months. Good passive orientation cuts what you spend running the house for its whole life, and it costs nothing to get right at the design stage.

Seismic design

The twin cities sit in an active earthquake region — the 2005 event is local memory, not an abstraction — so the structural design behind the architecture is detailed for seismic loading, not to a bare minimum. Columns, beams and connections are sized and detailed in line with the Building Code of Pakistan — Islamabad and Rawalpindi both sit in Seismic Zone 2B under its Seismic Provisions.

Plot sizes we design for

We design for the sizes that dominate here — 5 Marla and 10 Marla plots, and 1 Kanal for larger family homes — each with its own logic. A 5 Marla design has to squeeze efficiency out of every foot; a 1 Kanal design has room to breathe but far more scope to waste covered area if the plan is loose. On every one of them the ground-coverage limit, commonly 60–65% on DHA plots, sets the outer envelope the design has to live inside.

From approved drawings to grey structure

Once the map is stamped, the same drawing set drives construction. The setting-out plan puts the house on the plot; the structural drawings dictate the footings, columns and slabs of the grey structure; and the cast-in MEP conduiting follows the services layouts. Because DevPro can carry the project from the first line on a plan through to the finished build, nothing is lost in translation between designer and contractor — the drawings you approve are the house you get. See how that build phase runs in our house construction guide.