Balcony Enclosure and Glazing in Salt Lake Apartments

Balcony Enclosure and Glazing in Salt Lake Apartments

If you have a flat in one of the Salt Lake sectors and you are reading about balcony enclosure, the balcony is probably standing empty because nobody can sit out there from April to October, or it has become the place where the mop and the spare cartons live. The question we get asked is whether it should be enclosed, and the more useful question is what you lose when you seal it, what you gain in area that is usable through the year, and which parts of the decision are expensive to reverse once the glazing is ordered.

Salt Lake, written in older records as Bidhan Nagar, is a planned grid of blocks and sectors carrying a lot of building stock from the sixties through the nineties, and that shows up in balconies more clearly than in almost anything else inside a flat. Older blocks tend to have a deep service balcony off the kitchen with a thin parapet and a spout through it, the newer G+3 and G+4 rebuilds beside them have shallower projections meant to look like balconies more than to be used, and Sector V, the commercial and IT belt, has its own small serviced flats where the balcony is the only external opening. Our wider notes on the area sit on our Salt Lake area page.

What Salt Lake's building stock does to the balcony you have

Plots across the sectors are regular but tight, and because neighbours have usually built close to the boundary, the light and air a flat gets comes mostly from its own plot, so a balcony here is rarely a pleasant extra, it is often the only opening the room behind it has. On an older block it is typically a cantilevered projection with a thin parapet, a railing anchored into that parapet, and a floor sloped to a single spout. Because the rebuilds go up one plot at a time, the sky a balcony had last year can become a neighbour's wall this year, which changes the argument about whether you are sealing a view or sealing a light well. If your question is about an individual plot rather than a flat, the planning starts further out, at Stilt Parking and Car Porch Planning for a Salt Lake Plot and Compound Planning: Driveway, Setback Margins and Service Yard in Salt Lake.

Enclosed, half enclosed, or left open

Enclosure is basically a decision about how much of the year you want the space and what you are willing to give up in air, and it has three honest settings rather than one. Leaving it open keeps the drainage and the ventilation as the building intended, which is the right answer for a shallow projection that was never deep enough to sit in. Half enclosing it with an openable system and a mesh is what most Salt Lake flats actually want, because it gives you a room through the hot months and the rain, and still gives the room behind it air on the days you want air. Fully sealing it and conditioning it turns the balcony into part of the living room, which works as long as everybody accepts that the room behind has lost its cross ventilation.

Picking a glazing system, with its cost consequence attached

Most of the market here runs on aluminium sliders, and the spread between a basic section and a good one is mostly hardware rather than glass, so the rollers, the locks, the gaskets and the depth of the track are where the money quietly goes, and also where a system either keeps working after a few monsoons or starts to stick. uPVC seals better, slim profile systems cost more and give more glass with less frame, and frameless retractable glass gives the cleanest look and the fewest places to carry a mosquito mesh, which matters more in this city than the brochure suggests. Double glazing is almost never the best use of money in this climate when the same amount buys shading and better hardware, and the frame that looks identical in two quotations is often two different grades of section.

Water, slope and the monsoon detail that decides everything

Almost every balcony enclosure that fails, fails at water, and nearly always in the same two places, the bottom track and the joint where the frame meets the side wall. The original balcony was built to get wet, so it slopes to an outlet and drains through the parapet, and the moment you tile it flat to match the room inside you have built a shallow tank with a glazed lid over it. What we do instead is fix the finished floor level first, keep the existing outlet live, add weep holes so the bottom track drains outward, and waterproof the slab before any new tile goes down, right at the stage when that costs almost nothing. The monsoon drives rain sideways as much as down, so the head of the frame needs a drip, the jambs need a proper backer and sealant joint rather than a smear of silicone, and the holes left by an old railing have to be made good before anything is anchored into that parapet.

Heat, daylight and air once the opening is sealed

A west or south west facing balcony takes the worst of the afternoon, and glass does not reduce that heat, it holds it, so comfort here is decided by shading and openable area far more than by the glass specification. We keep a large share of the enclosure openable, we treat the mesh as part of the order rather than an afterthought, and where the orientation is poor we would rather spend on an external shade or a planted screen than on tinted glass that dulls the daylight the room behind it depends on. That room matters as much as the balcony, because if the balcony was its only external opening, sealing it converts a naturally ventilated room into one that needs mechanical air, which is why the balcony gets read together with the room it opens off, the subject of Family Room Design in Salt Lake: The Room Behind the Drawing Room.

Services and storage, and what the balcony was quietly carrying

A balcony is usually doing four or five jobs for the flat, and each of them has to land somewhere else on the drawing. Washing and drying are the big two, and a sealed balcony with no air movement is a poor place to dry clothes, so either the enclosure stays openable enough to dry in or the drying moves, and that gets solved on paper rather than discovered in June. The outdoor units of the air conditioners often sit out there, and they need air around them and a technician able to reach them, so a frame that boxes them in creates a service problem that returns every year. Storage works best shallow and full height against the dead wall, or as a bench with a lift-up seat under the glazing, because a deep run of cupboards in the one place the flat gets light is a trade nobody enjoys later. This part of the job sits inside our residential interior design work rather than being bolted on at the end.

Finishes, flooring and lighting for a half-outdoor room

Running one floor finish from the living room out through the balcony is the single move that makes an enclosed balcony read as part of the flat rather than as an addition, and the catch here is that the balcony floor still has to keep its slope while the room inside stays level, so that junction belongs on a drawing rather than left to the tiler to improvise. Ceilings are where we stay conservative, since a closed false ceiling over a space that can get damp becomes a place for water to sit unseen, so the soffit either stays exposed with a moisture tolerant paint or goes up in a board that takes humidity and gets access panels. Lighting belongs on its own circuit, warm and low, with surface fittings rather than recessed ones in an unsealed soffit, and one point left for a fan.

Permissions, structure and the paperwork conversation that comes first

Two things need checking before anybody orders glazing, and neither is a design question. The first is how an enclosed balcony is treated in your particular building, because whether it counts towards covered area varies with the building and its sanctioned plan, and that has to be confirmed for the specific address with Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation rather than inferred from what the flat two floors down has done. The second is ownership and consent, because in an apartment the balcony and the external face of the building usually involve the association and the deed, and that is a question for your own lawyer rather than for your architect or your glazing vendor. Structurally, an old cantilevered projection should not be asked to carry new masonry, and even a light frame has to be anchored into something sound. Where drawings go through the sanction process we prepare and run them, so the design, the interiors and the municipal route stay with one team, and plot owners often find two of our longer guides useful here, Occupancy Certificate Under Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation in Salt Lake: A Plot Owner's Guide and Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation Building Plan Sanction for a Duplex on an Individual Plot in Salt Lake.

How we run this work, and when a different provider suits you better

The way a studio is set up matters most on small jobs like this, because a balcony enclosure is exactly where scope scatters across three vendors. Sumana Kumar stays on the project through the drawings and through site rather than handing it to a junior once the agreement is signed, which on a balcony means the person who decided the floor level is the person standing there when the tiler asks about the slope. The design is worked out for your actual balcony, measured, with the room behind it and the services on it recorded, and every option reaches you with its cost consequence attached so the budget moves with your decisions rather than surfacing at the end as a surprise. Studio Contour has worked across the Salt Lake, New Town and Rajarhat belt since 2014, with 330+ buildings delivered, and flat interiors of this kind are a steady part of that, Dental Clinic Interior project in Kolkata being an example of that category of work and Colonnade House project in Chinar Park another. We also model the enclosure in context first, through 3d visualization and rendering, because a frame at eye level and a frame above it look very different in a render and identical in a quotation.

Not every reader needs a studio for this. If your balcony is a standard opening, the floor level and the drainage are staying exactly as they are, nothing on the balcony has to move, and what you want is one good slider with a mesh, then a competent glazing fabricator quoting you directly will be cheaper and faster than bringing in a design practice, and we would say so on a call rather than write you a proposal. Where our structure earns its fee is when the balcony is becoming a room, which means the floor, the drainage, the services, the room behind it and the paperwork all have to move together.

Where to start

The useful first step is a measurement and a careful look at the balcony along with the room behind it, because the right answer for a deep kitchen balcony in an older block and the right answer for a shallow projection on a new rebuild are not the same, and both are cheap to get right while they are still on paper. If you would like us to look at yours, get in touch with your sector and block, a couple of photographs and a rough idea of what the space has to do, and you can read more about how we work on interior design across Salt Lake.