Entryway and Shoe Storage Design in Salt Lake Flats

Entryway and Shoe Storage Design in Salt Lake Flats

The entry of a Salt Lake flat is almost never drawn as a room, and that is precisely why it is the first part of the home to stop working, because within months of moving in there are eleven pairs of shoes on the floor, an umbrella propped against the wall, and a shoe rack bought in a hurry that is two sizes too small for the family that actually lives there. If you have searched for this, you already know the problem is not the rack, it is that nobody planned the two square metres behind your front door before the tiling went down and the switchboard was fixed.

Salt Lake, written also as Bidhan Nagar, was laid out as a planned township of numbered blocks and sectors, and the flats here come out of building stock running from the sixties through the nineties, often later sold or let floor by floor, with newer G+3 and G+4 rebuilds beside them on the same regular but tight plot. An older converted floor usually opens straight into the living room with a beam overhead and no lobby at all, while a newer rebuild often gives you a short internal passage that can carry a full-height unit on one side, but only if somebody thought about the door swing, the meter position and the distribution board at drawing stage rather than once the carpenter is already on site.

What follows is how we plan that space at Studio Contour, which decisions get locked at which stage, and where the money goes, so you can judge any proposal you receive, ours included, against something more useful than a rendering. The entry is consistently the most constrained part of the plan in our interior design work across Salt Lake.

Reading the entry before anything gets drawn

Before a line of the unit is drawn we measure the things that will veto it later, which is the door leaf width and the side it is hinged on, the clear passage left when it stands fully open, the soffit height of any beam crossing the entry, and the exact position of the meter, the distribution board and the intercom handset. In a Salt Lake block the common landing belongs to the building and not to your flat, so nothing can be pushed outwards, which means every litre of storage has to be found inside your own four walls.

The second half of the survey is a count rather than a dimension. We ask the family to count pairs honestly, person by person, separating what gets worn daily from what comes out twice a year, and then we add what arrives with the shoes, which is helmets, school bags, a folded pram, umbrellas and sometimes a cycle that has to live indoors. That count is the brief, and when it is skipped you get a beautifully finished unit that overflows in the second monsoon.

The shoe count is the brief, not the finish

Shelf height is where most entry units quietly fail, because a standard rack is built for flat chappals and loafers, and the moment a pair of running shoes or ankle boots goes in, the pair above has to come out. We size a daily zone with generous clear height over an open ventilated shelf, a seasonal zone with closed shutters above it, and one compartment deep enough for the awkward item every household owns, with shelf pins drilled so a shelf can still move five years later.

Depth is the other quiet constraint, because adult shoes need a sensible carcass depth and a narrow Salt Lake passage may simply not have it, which is when tilt-out shallow drawers start to look attractive. They are efficient for flats and sandals, the catch here is that a tilt unit will not take a tall shoe, so if the count includes boots you still need one deeper section, and that is the sort of thing we resolve through custom furniture design rather than by picking a catalogue size and hoping.

The decisions that are expensive to reverse

Some entry decisions are carpentry, which can be changed later for the price of the carpentry, and some are civil or electrical, which means changing them involves breaking finished surfaces. The hinge side of the main door, the position of the distribution board, the route of the intercom cable and the depth of a false ceiling under the entry beam all sit in the second category, so if a full-height unit is going to stand on the wall that carries the meter and the board, that has to be settled before the conduiting is chased into the wall.

Flooring is the other one, because once vitrified tile is laid wall to wall and the skirting is fixed, a floor-mounted unit either sits on the skirting with a gap behind it or the skirting gets cut, and neither looks planned. We settle at drawing stage whether the unit is floor-mounted on a sacrificial plinth, wall-hung with a lit recess below, or built into a masonry niche, because each needs a different instruction to a different trade in a different week.

The humid stretch, the monsoon and the sealed shoe cabinet

Kolkata gives you a long humid stretch and then a serious monsoon, and a shoe cabinet is basically a sealed box full of damp leather, so if there is no air movement through it the smell is not a mystery, it is physics. We detail entry units for natural ventilation rather than relying on a deodorant pouch, which means louvred shutters on the closed sections, a slotted back panel where the wall allows it, a gap at the plinth, and an open bottom shelf where wet footwear can drip and dry.

Material specification matters just as much on a wall that stays damp for weeks, so we specify boiling water proof plywood for entry carcasses and keep raw medium density fibreboard away from the plinth, because the bottom hundred millimetres is the part that meets mop water, monsoon splash and wet umbrellas. The wider logic behind decisions like these is set out in Architect in Salt Lake, Kolkata: Designing in a Planned Township.

Seating, hooks, light and the first ten seconds

The entry is used for about ten seconds at a time, and what gets used in those ten seconds is seating, hooks and a flat surface. A bench rather than a stool, because a stool gets moved and never comes back, and a bench carries drawers underneath it. Hooks at two heights, because a child will not use an adult hook and will drop the bag on the floor instead. A shallow ledge for keys, wallet and phone, with one charging point at that height.

Light is the part people underestimate. In Salt Lake the neighbours are frequently built up to the boundary, so light and air come from your own plot, and the internal entry passage is almost always the darkest part of the plan, which means it needs its own switch at the door that turns on everything you need to come home and leave again. Where the entry can borrow daylight from a room behind it, through fluted glass or a high transom for instance, that borrowed light changes the space more than any fitting will, and inside the cabinetry a low warm plinth light earns its cost.

Every option with its cost consequence attached

Entry units can cost very little or a great deal, and almost all of that range sits in four choices, which are carcass material, shutter finish, hardware quality and how much of the wall the unit covers. A laminate shutter on boiling water proof ply with decent soft close hinges is a sound specification, while veneer, lacquered glass, a full-height run to the ceiling or a handleless push to open detail each move the figure, and rates vary with the flat and the quantity, so the only honest number is one quoted against your own drawings.

What we do instead of a price list is present every option with its cost consequence attached, so a decision to upgrade the shutter finish shows you immediately what it adds and what it would cover instead, which keeps the budget moving with your choices rather than arriving as a surprise once the work is already open. For a sense of the finished residential work this sits inside, Dental Clinic Interior project in Kolkata is an example of that category of work.

The order the work happens in

Entry work almost never travels alone, because the people who want a proper entryway usually want the living room and the storage sorted too, and that is renovation and remodelling rather than a single piece of furniture, so the expensive mistakes come from drawing the carpentry after the electrical work is buried and the tiles are down. If there is structural alteration, an added floor or a rebuild involved, the sanction route for Salt Lake addresses runs through Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation, a different authority from NKDA in New Town, and Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation Building Plan Sanction for a Plot With an Existing Structure to Demolish in Salt Lake goes through that in detail.

On our projects the principal architect, Sumana Kumar, stays on the job through drawings, sanction and site, which is deliberate, because the entry is exactly the kind of small, service-crowded space where a decision taken on site by somebody who was not in the design conversation turns into a unit that will not close over the distribution board.

When a different kind of provider suits you better

If what you actually want is one shoe cabinet and nothing else, and the wall is clear, the services are not in the way and the pair count is modest, then a competent local carpenter working to a sketch, or a standard unit from a furniture brand, is the right amount of money to spend and you should spend it there. Hiring an architecture and interiors studio for a single cabinet is poor value for you, and the same holds in an eleven month rental where nothing fixed can be built.

A turnkey fit-out package suits a different reader again, somebody who wants a fixed scope delivered quickly and is content with standard sizes, which is a legitimate model whose structural trade-off is that the catalogue has to be protected, so the space gets adjusted to fit the product. Where our way of working earns its fee is the flat where the services are in the wrong place, the beam crosses the entry, and the entry has to be solved along with everything behind it.

Starting on your own entry

If you have a flat or a floor in the Salt Lake, New Town or Rajarhat belt and the entry is the thing that irritates you daily, the useful first step is a site measure and an honest pair count, after which options can be drawn and costed against your actual door. You can see the range of work we take on from /in/salt-lake-sector-2, Residential Building Project in Salt Lake gives a further sense of how we finish residential interiors, and Music Room and Practice Space Design in Salt Lake, Retail Showroom Interior Design in Salt Lake and Rental-Income Building Design in Salt Lake: Floors That Earn cover related briefs if adjacent spaces are in scope. When you are ready to put a measure in the diary you can get in touch.