Sanitaryware and CP Fitting Selection for Salt Lake Bathrooms

Sanitaryware and CP Fitting Selection for Salt Lake Bathrooms

If you are planning a bathroom in one of the Salt Lake blocks and you have already given up two Sundays to showrooms with a folder of brochures in hand, you have probably worked out that the brochures answer the easy half of the question and leave the hard half alone, because a catalogue can show you what a rimless pan looks like, and it cannot tell you whether that pan will sit on the outlet position your existing stack gives you, or whether the concealed diverter you liked will fit inside the wall thickness you actually have, and at the end of the day those are the questions that decide whether the bathroom works or merely photographs well.

A bathroom here also has to survive a long humid stretch and a serious monsoon, which is the reason a zinc alloy spout pits at the collar after a few seasons while a brass one does not, and the reason an exhaust route that discharges into a dead shaft leaves a ceiling damp for weeks together. Put the Salt Lake building stock on top of that, where much of the housing went up between the sixties and the nineties with bathrooms sized for a bucket, a tap and a floor-mounted pan, and selection becomes a question of what the room and the services can actually carry.

So this page is written the way we work through it inside the studio, where the layout and the services come first, the sanitaryware schedule follows from them, the fittings follow from the water supply you really have, and every option gets priced out loud, so your budget moves when you change your mind instead of at the end, when changing your mind means breaking tiles.

What the Salt Lake building stock does to a bathroom

Salt Lake, written Bidhan Nagar in municipal paperwork, is a planned grid of blocks and sectors, and that regularity is useful to us, because plot sizes repeat and the structural grid of a sixties or seventies house is usually readable before we open a drawing, and so is the set of constraints that comes with it. The older bathrooms sit over a shallow sunk portion, so the depth available for a fall towards the floor trap is limited, and a wall-hung pan with a concealed cistern may need a wall build-up the room cannot spare. Soil and waste stacks often run in a narrow shaft shared between floors, which fixes the outlet position and sometimes the trap type along with it. Plots are regular but tight and the neighbour is frequently built up to the boundary, so a bathroom window opens onto a gap that gives you some daylight and almost no cross draft, which pushes ventilation onto a mechanical route that has to be designed rather than improvised. Newer G+3 and G+4 rebuilds are a different exercise, because there you set the drainage where you want it and the real question is whether bathrooms stack cleanly floor over floor, and if you are still weighing that larger choice, Renovate or Rebuild an Old Salt Lake House works through it.

Fix the layout and the services before you shortlist a single tap

The useful zoning logic for any bathroom is wet and dry, which sounds obvious until you see how often a door swings into a basin or a shower throws water across the only run of storage. We settle the door swing, the glass line, the WC position, the basin counter depth, the shower drain and the direction of fall on drawing, and we check the exhaust duct route at the same time, because that duct has to cross a beam or a false ceiling and it is cheaper to find that out now. Mirror and task lighting get drawn with the electrical layout rather than left to the electrician's judgement on site, and a point for a geyser, a towel warmer or a bidet spray that was never drawn becomes a surface conduit later. Where the room does have a reasonable opening we treat it as a room with a view and not a service area, which is the same instinct behind Bay Window and Window Seat Design in Salt Lake Rooms.

Reading the sanitaryware decision instead of the brochure

A WC is three decisions pretending to be one, basically, the pan type, the trap and the cistern, and only the first is on the showroom floor. The trap is decided by what your existing outlet gives you, so an S-trap house stays an S-trap house unless you rework the drainage, and the distance from the finished wall to the outlet centre has to match the pan you are buying or the pan simply does not sit. A concealed cistern inside a frame gives you the clean wall-hung look and a service life question with it, because the inlet and flush valves inside that frame will need attention one day, so the flush plate has to be the serviceable kind and the frame has to sit where the plate can come off. On the basin side the choice between an under-counter bowl, a counter-top bowl and a wall-hung basin moves the drain height and the supply point, which is why we pick it with the plumbing layout open. A Salt Lake residence we have completed, Dental Clinic Interior project in Kolkata, is an example of that category of work.

CP fittings, the humid months and what you can service later

The part of a fitting that decides its life is the part you cannot see in the showroom, which is the body, so we look for a brass body with a ceramic disc cartridge in a size that is still being made, and we check that the range has spares available in Kolkata and not only in a catalogue. Finishes matter more here than in a dry climate, because the humid stretch and the monsoon months leave a film on everything, and chrome tolerates that film and a daily wipe better than most alternatives, while matt black and brushed gold need a properly deposited coating along with an owner who accepts that water spotting shows. The unforgiving items are the concealed bodies, the shower diverter above all, because those are buried behind tile and their depth has to be set against the tile plus adhesive thickness before tiling starts, not after.

Water pressure, heating and the complaint that arrives after handover

Most of the disappointment with a new bathroom is not about the fittings at all, it is about flow. A rain shower head wants volume at a gentle pressure, a slim overhead on a long arm wants more than an old tank sitting barely above the top floor ceiling will give it, and a thermostatic mixer wants hot and cold arriving at roughly balanced pressure or it will keep hunting. So we look at the tank height, the pipe diameters, the length of the hot water run from the geyser to the farthest outlet and whether a pressure pump belongs in the scheme, and we do that before the shower is selected rather than after you have fallen for one. For instance, if the bathroom belongs to an office fit-out in the Sector V belt rather than a home, the brief shifts towards traffic, cleaning cycles and robustness, and Interior Designer in Salt Lake Sector V: Homes and Workspaces covers that side of the work.

The parts that are expensive to reverse

Waterproofing is the first of them and the sequence is not negotiable, so the sunk portion and the wet wall get treated, the ponding test happens and gets witnessed, and only then does anybody tile. Pipe sleeves through the slab, the concealed body depths, the shower niche framing and the access panel for the cistern all have to exist before the tiler sets out, because a niche cut after tiling never aligns with the tile joints and an access panel added later is visible forever. The catch here is that the residential interior design drawings and the plumbing layout have to be one coordinated set rather than two sets that disagree, and the phasing has to be deliberate, which is what Project Timeline and Phasing for a Salt Lake House sets out for a whole house.

Every option carries a cost consequence, and we attach it before you choose

Bathroom budgets go wrong because fittings are chosen as taste and discovered as cost, so we run it the other way round, which means the schedule leaves our table with an option tier against each line, a workable choice, a better choice and the one you will regret not taking, each with its consequence written beside it, and you move the budget yourself instead of hearing about it at billing. The second structural thing worth knowing is who stays on your project, because Sumana Kumar remains on it through sanction and through site rather than handing it to a junior once the agreement is signed, so the person who drew the plumbing layout is the person answering the plumber's question about a trap on a Thursday morning. Architecture, interiors and the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation sanction route sit with one team here, so you are not carrying information between a drafting service, a contractor and an interior vendor who each know one third of the project, and Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation Building Plan Sanction for a Commercial Office Building in Salt Lake goes through that process in detail for a commercial case. Another finished Salt Lake project, Filigree House project in New Town, is an example of that category of work, and the scope of how we handle interior design across Salt Lake alongside residential architecture is set out on those pages.

When a different kind of provider suits you better

If you are replacing a leaking pillar tap, a cracked pan and a tired basin in exactly the positions they already occupy, with no change to the drainage and no change to the tile, then a competent plumber and a good showroom counter will serve you better than we will, and a design fee buys you very little. The same holds if you have already settled on one brand's complete bathroom package and want that brand's own installer accountable for it, since a single supplier with a single warranty is a clean arrangement and a studio in the middle only adds a layer. And if the lowest quote decides it and somebody in the family can be on site every day, a contractor-led route will usually come in lower, because what we add is drawing, sequencing and cost control over decisions, which is worth paying for when a bathroom is being moved or carved out of a difficult old house, and not when it is being refreshed in place.

Where to start

The quickest useful conversation is the one where you send a photograph of the existing bathroom, the floor plan if you have it and a note on whether the drainage can move, and we can usually tell you from that what is open to you and what the building has already decided. You can see the rest of our work in the area on our Salt Lake area page, and when you are ready to put a schedule together, get in touch.