Joyful human endeavour creating regenerative systems for the wellbeing of community and biosphere.
We design for whole systems that harvest water, grow forests and create spaces for human habitation across:
Farms and large landscapes
Urban commons
Collectives, communities & layouts
Schools, institutes and industries
We believe land regeneration is a participatory process. Our work is rooted in sharing knowledge, empowering people to understand their land, and building systems with them - not just for them. While most of our work is concentrated in southern India, we work across bioregions, adapting our approach to each unique place and context.
Ananas was founded in 2017 by Kiri, Jananee, and Himanshu, with an initial focus on permaculture design projects. As our team grew, so did the scope of our work - expanding into ecological restoration, landscape design, community layouts, and more.
The name Ananas - meaning pineapple in over 40 languages - reflects both resilience and lightness. While the work of regeneration is deeply meaningful, we believe it’s just as important to approach it with curiosity, connection, a sprinkle of humour and an openness to joy :)
People of Ananas
Our team brings together a diverse mix of skills and perspectives - because we believe great design emerges from collaboration across disciplines.
We are designers, architects, accountants, naturalists, gardeners and systems thinkers. Some of us work closely with water and land, others with plants, people, and wildlife. Together, we approach every project as a living system - where each element, and each perspective, plays a vital role.
Jananee Mohan is a Permie with a design background from NIFT. She completed her Permaculture Design course with Rico Zook and Narsanna Koppula in January 2017, and her vision is to use design thinking to integrate non-linear small-scale self-sustaining systems that can transcend into larger patterns of community resilience.
She spent her formative years in her grandfather's farm, who was a self-taught natural farmer and used innovative ways to integrate the inputs and outputs of his farm . She shares the same kinship as him with soil and all the faunal and floral diversity of a farm. She also firmly believes in extending principles of permaculture to all aspects of one’s life to achieve holistic well-being of the planet.
Growing up in Bangalore all her life, her goals are to work with small groups of intelligent and sprightful communities in the city to transition into meeting their urban needs more holistically, and to drive permaculture thinking into mainstream consciousness.
Jananee Mohan
Co-founder
Kiri was born in England and moved with her mother and brother to India when she was four. She spent her formative years on a farm 100km from Bangalore and went to school in the city.
Upon completion of a bachelors in environmental social sciences at the University of Kent in England she moved back to India, first doing urban farming and gardening workshops in Mumbai.
In 2014 she discovered permaculture and completed her first PDC with Rico Zook, followed by other trainings at Aranya Agricultural Alternatives and with Jude Hobbs. This new path beautifully brought together all the topics she’d been drawn to over the years and provided a systematic way forward. It also, most importantly, connected her with Jananee and Himanshu and together they founded Ananas in 2017.
Kiri Meili
Co-founder
Himanshu Arteev is an ecological planner-designer-implementer with an experience in climate adaptation and mitigation strategies from an ecological, social and a regional standpoint. His specific interests and expertise lie in water conservation, wetland restoration, social equity and designing for adaptation to changing habitats.
With a foundation in environmental, regional and urban planning from the London School of Economics and permaculture training from Narsanna Koppula, Rico Zook, and Jude Hobbs he blends his expertise to create processes for self-sustaining and regenerative human habitats. When he is not stopping at every pond, wetland or open well to take photos, he strives to craft a world where nature and society coexist.
Kiri, Jananee and Himanshu co created Ananas in 2017, which nurtures a small, incredibly diverse and passionate team. They transform bold visions into reality, supporting ecosystems that regenerate and inspire.
Himanshu Arteev
Co-founder
Sanjana grew up in cantonments across the country, surrounded by gardens and green spaces that sparked her love for plants and landscapes. But it was the wild, overgrown patches at the edges - abandoned gardens and forgotten corners - where her curiosity truly came alive. With a family that shared a deep love for wildlife, farming and botany, her interest in ecology - and in shaping spaces - took root early on.
Trained as an architect, she briefly explored interior design but soon found herself drawn back to landscapes. A Permaculture Design Certification course with Rico Zook expanded her understanding of regenerative design and ecology. For the last five years, Sanjana has been part of the diverse team at Ananas, working at the intersection of ecological restoration and landscape design. Her work focuses on ecological site assessments, water management, planting design and regenerative land-use strategies across farms and rural landscapes. She enjoys blending technical design tools with systems thinking, using them to create spaces that are fluid, resilient, beautiful and deeply rooted in ecology.
Outside of work, she loves exploring art, craft and natural history, often finding quiet ways to connect with plants, materials and landscapes.
Sanjana Radhakrishnan
Ecological designer
Theertha is an explorer, who is passionate about regenerative methods of design and keen to unlearn and learn. As a young architecture graduate, her interests shifted towards the Socio-environment sector early on. This change in perspective, brought upon during her internship at Auroville, took her to Rajasthan through the India Fellow Programme to work with an NGO in the forests of Ranthambhore.
Soon after working with the children in Sawai Madhopur and returning to home base in Bangalore, Theertha worked with Jalaposhan Trust, a citizen group that works with conserving Jakkur Lake (urban commons). Through her experience as lake manager at Jakkur Lake, she found her interest lies in the relationship of local communities and their role in the conservation of the environment. She also found herself awed by the intertwined relationships of flora & fauna with their habitats.
Theertha enjoys taking pictures of patterns & details observed of plants, insects, and life of all forms. She believes that it is important to continue to learn, and hopes to do so from all communities, permies, designers, wanderers through sharing knowledge and experiences.
Theertha Ravindran
Ecological designer
Varun specialises in understanding the hydrology of landscapes and designing integrated water management strategies that seamlessly integrate with their natural context and enhance natural processes. He enjoys leveraging GIS platforms and open-source geospatial data to analyse environmental factors such as climate, topography, soil and geology, and apply it to landscape and ecological analysis. His passion also lies in exploring and learning about floral communities through the lens of ecology and the dynamics of ecological succession.
Driven by a passion for continuous learning, Varun actively deepens his knowledge in ecological principles, integrating new insights into context-sensitive designs. His approach is a dynamic interplay between research and practice, where hands-on fieldwork and implementation informs design improvements, creating solutions that are both practical and deeply rooted in ecological principles. Bringing a unique interdisciplinary perspective, Varun draws on his early academic background in finance to enhance his ability to approach water planning with precision and analytical rigour, blending past expertise with his current focus on ecology and water design.
Varun Behroonani
Ecological designer
Joshua is an ecological designer with a background in architecture and work experience in landscape architecture and design. As a student pursuing architecture, his interests were geared towards sustainable practices and blurring the divide between designed spaces and the natural world. This area of interest was nurtured during the course of practice as a junior landscape architect, which deepened his interest in regenerative ecosystems and permaculture practices.
The Permaculture Design Course with Narsanna Koppula brought in the lens of a whole systems approach in his practice. He enjoyed observing and understanding patterns and relations in an ecosystem, which allowed for appreciating the land in its current state of being whilst aiding its regeneration. He strongly believes in the need to coexist with the natural world and tries to bring that in through his work.
Joshua Danesh
Ecological designer
Debasish originally hails from the Eastern Ghats of Odisha and is an aspiring ecologist. With a bachelor's in design, he(/they) has worked across corporates, design consultancies as well as self-help groups for half a decade as a graphic and communication designer. However, his true passion for ecology and the looming climate crisis led him to transition into volunteering for organizations dealing with conservation, restoration, and climate change. While volunteering for a flora survey in Odisha, he got the opportunity to collaborate with Ananas for the first time.
With this unique blend of design thinking and ecological knowledge, Debasish revels in understanding the correlation between everything that moves and everything that doesn’t and of course their impact on the local ecology. Debasish believes in failing and actively fails to find out that singular bio-geographic pattern or concept imposing its way through the plurality of nature.
“You teach me, I forget. You show me, I remember. You involve me, I understand.”- Edward O. Wilson.
Debasish Satapathy
Ecological designer
Gautam grew up on a tiny desert island called Bahrain for most of his life. His world then opened up to a truly wild environment for the first time in the grasslands of Kenya in 2019, during a wildlife conservation trip with UNIA. This instilled a lingering curiosity which immediately took him to the forests of Kanha, after his graduation in Architecture in 2022. He trained as a naturalist under the guidance of Narayana Rangaswamy with TajSafaris and discovered his deep interest for avifauna.
An artist at his core, his strong incline towards design informs his praxis that is functional yet aesthetic, woven with strong contextual narratives. He enjoys bridging these gaps in ecological design, that is inherently wild and organic. He aims to get his hands dirty as he closely studies the evolution of a landscape through anthropological factors. You can find him at a park, likely drawing a tree he admires.
Gautam Shanbhag
Ecological designer
Amol Kadam is an animal husbandry specialist with over 21 years of deep learning in the field with a focus on natural rearing and animal welfare practices. Raised on a farm on the outskirts of Bangalore, watching his father, a dairy technologist, run a dairy farm along side paddy cultivation, he observed the subtle intricacies and interconnectedness of animal husbandry and organic agriculture, contributing beautifully towards the health of the farm ecosystem.
As a second generation farmer, being mindful of the rapidly changing climate, the increasing pressures on food and water systems, he gravitated towards alternative agricultural philosophies to stumble upon permaculture. His vision continues, to create resilient, regenerative landscapes with an aim to integrate design principles mimicking natural ecosystems.
At Ananas Amol brings to the team his hands on ground experience over the years, people management and analytical skills. His guiding principles—rooted in his upbringing on the farm—continue to inspire his work, as he seeks to cultivate not just food, but also a deeper connection between people and the land.
Amol Kadam
Ecological designer
Vijayananda
Nursery ManagerOur team in its element
Curious to know more? Drop us a message at info@ananas.design or request a call - we'd love to connect! :)