Rental-Income Building Design in Salt Lake: Floors That Earn

Rental-Income Building Design in Salt Lake: Floors That Earn

If you own a plot in Salt Lake, or you are close to buying one, and you want a building that pays for itself, the question you are really asking is not how many floors you can put up, it is how many of those floors somebody will want to rent at a rate that holds year after year, and that gets settled in the design long before the market votes on it.

A rental building is a different design problem from a family house on the same plot, because every decision has a tenant on the other side of it, and tenants are unsentimental about plans: a flat with a dark middle room lets slower, and a staircase that walks a tenant past your own front door earns a quiet discount you never win back through fittings. The plan carries the rent, the elevation carries the enquiry, and between them they decide who comes to see the floor and what they will pay.

We are Studio Contour, an architecture and interior design studio in New Town working across the Salt Lake, New Town and Rajarhat belt, and since 2014 we have delivered 330+ buildings, many on exactly this kind of tight, regular plot with neighbours already standing on both boundaries.

Decide who occupies what before you decide how many floors

The first thing we settle is who occupies what, because that one decision reorganises the whole plan. A building where you live on one floor and let the rest needs your floor insulated from stair traffic and your parking separated from the tenants', whereas a building let end to end can run one clean core and a repeated floor plate, which is cheaper to build and simpler to sanction. One unit per floor earns a family rate and holds tenants longer, two smaller units earn more in total but double your meters, doors and maintenance calls, and on a plot of the size common in the Bidhan Nagar sectors a two-unit floor often leaves one unit whose second bedroom has no usable window, which is the unit that sits empty between tenancies.

We settle that right at the start, before anything is drawn as residential architecture, because changing it once the structural drawings are issued means redrawing everything behind it. The ground floor goes the same way, since parking under a lifted building is the pattern most Salt Lake rebuilds take, basically because a tenant with a car will not take a floor without a space, while a shop at ground level is a separate conversation, Salt Lake being a planned residential grid with Sector V sitting apart as the commercial and IT belt, so what your plot permits has to be confirmed rather than assumed from a neighbour's shuttered frontage.

Massing on a plot where the neighbours are already at the boundary

Salt Lake was laid out as a planned grid of blocks and sectors, which is a gift in one way, since the roads are legible and the plot shapes regular, and a constraint in another, because the plots are tight and much of the stock around you went up between the sixties and the nineties, with neighbours built hard to the boundary on both sides, so your light and your air come from your own plot and nowhere else.

The work, then, is to put the rooms people pay for on the openings you actually have, and the stair, the toilets and the storage on the faces that were never going to give you anything, which on a long narrow plot usually means an open-to-sky cutout serving the middle of the plan on every floor, sized honestly rather than as a token. Floor area ratio, ground coverage and setbacks govern how far you can take it, and they vary with plot size, road width and the rules current at the time, so they get confirmed for your plot before the massing is locked.

The column grid is the part you cannot change later

A rental building changes hands and changes use across its life, and the only part that cannot follow along is the structure, so the column grid is where we spend disproportionate care. The catch here is that in a reinforced concrete frame the column positions and beam depths decide where walls can later move, whether a room can be split when a tenant wants a study, and whether a false ceiling drops so low that the room reads smaller than the area you are charging for.

Stacking protects your income just as quietly, since kitchens over kitchens, toilets over toilets and one service wall per floor mean a leak on the third floor is repairable without opening the second floor's ceiling, which is the difference between an afternoon of work and a tenant asking for a reduction. For the category of work this belongs to, Fernwood House project in Salt Lake is one of our finished projects in this belt, and it is an example of that category rather than a plan to copy onto your plot.

Light, air and a monsoon that tests every detail

Kolkata's long humid stretch and a serious monsoon are not footnotes in a building you intend to let, they are the reason some floors feel fresh in August and others smell closed. Natural ventilation only works when air has somewhere to leave, so openings give each unit a cross draught across the short dimension of the plan, and where a genuine cross draught is impossible on a middle unit we say so and design around it instead of drawing a window onto a wall your neighbour will build against anyway.

The monsoon half is unglamorous and tenants judge you on it, so overhangs go on the weather faces, balcony floors fall to an outlet and the terrace waterproofing carries a stated slope and tested drains, because the cheap versions of all of this look identical on handover day.

The elevation is what brings the enquiry to the door

The elevation has one job, which is getting the enquiry to the door, and newer G+3 and G+4 rebuilds now stand beside houses from the seventies and eighties on the same block, so your building reads against its neighbours whether you intended that or not. We design the front as a composition of the things that have to be there anyway, the parking opening, the stair window, the balconies and the terrace parapet, so it looks resolved without applied decoration that ages badly. Seeing it before you commit is worth the step, and 3D Elevation Visualisation Before You Build in Salt Lake explains how we use that.

The sanction route through Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation

Drawings for a building in Salt Lake go through Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation, the building authority for the Bidhannagar area, while New Town immediately next door sits with NKDA instead, so the route depends on which side of that line your plot falls. We prepare and run the drawings through the Bidhannagar process ourselves, so the sanction set comes out of the same drawings as the design, and a query coming back does not land on your desk to be forwarded between an architect, a draughtsman and a contractor.

What the process asks for, what it costs and how long it runs vary with the plot and with the rules current at the time, so we confirm them for your plot at the start rather than publishing figures here, and the mechanics of a submission are set out in Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation Building Plan Sanction for a Commercial Office Building in Salt Lake, while Renovating a Salt Lake Cooperative Home: A Practical Guide is the more useful read if what you hold is an existing cooperative flat. Ownership, title, the taxation of rental income and loan structuring sit outside our scope, so those questions go to your own lawyer, your CA and your lender.

The principal architect, Sumana Kumar, stays on through sanction and through site rather than handing the job to a junior once the agreement is signed, and that matters most at exactly this stage, when a decision taken on site in forty minutes can undo a month of plan work.

Every option comes with its cost consequence attached

Every option we put in front of you carries its cost consequence attached, because an option without a number against it is not a decision, it is a daydream. If a lift takes the building from walk-up to lift-served, we show what the shaft does to your floor plate, what the maintenance looks like as a running line and what the letting difference plausibly is between a third floor with a lift and one without.

Inside the floors, specification is where owners either protect the rent or quietly leak it, since a let kitchen and a let bathroom take more abuse than an owner's do, so the counter material, the treatment under the sink and the extract matter more than the finish on the wardrobe shutters. We handle that as residential interior design within the same project, and the way we approach interior design across Salt Lake carries over to rented floors with durability put ahead of novelty. Two of the rooms owners ask about most are covered in Dining Room Interior Design in Salt Lake and Kitchen Storage Planning for Salt Lake Homes, and Residential Building Project in Salt Lake is another finished project in this category of work.

When a different kind of provider suits you better

There are owners for whom a studio like ours is the wrong spend, and it is better said plainly. If you are putting up a straightforward G+1 on a regular plot with a plan close to what the sector already has, and you have a contractor you have used before and trust, then a drafting service for the sanction set plus that contractor will get you a serviceable building for less than our fee. If you intend to sell the built units rather than hold and let them, a development arrangement with a builder shifts the capital and much of the risk off you, and what it produces is designed to sell rather than to be held, which may be exactly what you want.

The case for us is strongest when the plot is awkward, when the tenancy pattern is not the standard one, or when you have no appetite for carrying information between an architect, a draughtsman, a contractor and an interior vendor.

Where to start

What we need for a useful first conversation is short and specific, the plot dimensions, the road it faces, how long you intend to hold it and what you can commit as a budget, and from that we can tell you honestly whether the building you have in mind earns what you think it earns. If you are weighing the belt more broadly, our Salt Lake area page sets out how we work across these sectors, and when you are ready, get in touch and we will look at your plot properly before anyone draws a line.