Store Room Design for a Salt Lake House

Store Room Design for a Salt Lake House

If you own a house or a flat in Salt Lake and you are reading about store room design, it is usually because the store you already have has quietly stopped working, since the suitcases went in first, then the spare mattress, then the cartons that come out once a year for Pujo, and now the door opens half way and nothing at the back is reachable without emptying the front. Shelving feels like the answer, and the catch here is that shelving is almost the last decision in a store room, because what went wrong earlier was the size, the position on the floor plate, and the fact that nobody planned how things move in and out.

A store room is also the one space that gets designed by subtraction, where the plan is drawn, the bedrooms and the living room and the kitchen take what they need, and whatever is left near the stair becomes the store. Settled at the same time as the rest of the floor it is one of the most useful rooms you have, because it keeps the bedrooms free of almirahs that never really fitted, and in a city this humid it protects things that are otherwise being slowly ruined.

This page is written from inside the studio, so it covers how we plan this space on Salt Lake plots and flats, which decisions are expensive to reverse, and the order the work happens in. Studio Contour works across the Salt Lake, New Town and Rajarhat belt from New Town, with Sumana Kumar as principal architect, and since 2014 the studio has delivered 330+ buildings.

What goes in, and how often it comes out

A typical Salt Lake load is suitcases and trolley bags, a folded guest bed, Pujo and wedding cartons, winter quilts, the big degchis that appear when twenty people are eating, paint tins and tools, files nobody will open but nobody will throw, a ladder, and in many houses the luggage of a son or daughter living abroad. Each of those has a depth, and depth is what sets the room, right, because the shelf that takes a large suitcase is not the shelf that suits files.

So we sort the list into weekly, monthly and once a year, and the plan follows that sorting, with the weekly things at waist and eye level near the door, the monthly things above and below them, and the annual cartons sent to the loft or the deepest run. The commonest failure here is not shortage of space, it is that everything was given equal priority, so the weekly items ended up behind the annual ones and the room became a dumping face rather than storage.

Where the store lands on a tight Salt Lake plot

Salt Lake is a planned grid of blocks and sectors, which helps when you are planning a house, because the plots are regular and you know what you are dealing with before the survey, and the difficulty is that regular does not mean generous. Plots are tight, the neighbours on both flanks have very often built right up to their boundary, so light and air have to be found inside your own plot, and on a G+3 or G+4 rebuild squeezed between older sixties and seventies houses every foot of setback is already working for daylight. That is why the store gets positioned deliberately rather than by default.

Which one is right depends on how the rest of the floor is breathing, so the decision sits downstream of Daylight and Cross Ventilation Planning for Salt Lake Houses.

Damp is the real enemy, not clutter

Kolkata gives you a long humid stretch and then a serious monsoon, and the store room is where that shows up first, because nobody enters it for weeks and it is usually pressed against an external wall with no air movement. Clothes come out smelling, carton bottoms soften, documents cockle, leather grows mould, and the conclusion drawn is that the storage was badly built when what was missing was air and separation from the wall.

So the approach is consistent. There is always ventilation, even if it is only a louvred vent high on the external wall with a small exhaust on a timer, because a sealed box in this weather is a slow damage machine. Nothing sits directly on the floor, so the lowest shelf is lifted clear and the floor stays sweepable, which also means a seepage line gets noticed before it reaches your cartons. Where the store backs onto a toilet or a face that takes driving rain, the waterproofing is specified at structure stage instead of being discovered when the first carton goes soft.

The services nobody warns you about

A store room attracts services, and on Salt Lake houses it attracts them late, which is the problem. The inverter and its battery, the pump starter, the water filter, the broadband box and sometimes the hatch to the overhead tank all get pushed in here, because nobody minds how this room looks. Collecting them is sensible, but only when it was planned, because otherwise the inverter ends up where the suitcase shelf was meant to go, or a shut off valve sits buried behind a fixed carcass that has to be cut open the first time there is a leak.

So we decide at drawing stage which services live in the store, give each one a reserved zone with clearance for heat and for a hand, keep every valve behind a removable panel, and put the power points where the equipment actually is. Lighting gets the same treatment, because a bulb in the middle of the ceiling throws your own shadow onto whatever you are reaching for, so the light belongs at the front of the shelf runs.

Shelving, doors and the parts that are expensive to undo

The honest position on cabinetry here is that masonry or steel shelving with a hardwearing finish outlasts the pretty version and costs less, so this is the correct room to spend less on surface and more on structure. Doors bite hardest, because a conventional shutter needs swing space in a room that is already tight, and a sliding shutter buys that space back at the cost of only ever reaching half the opening at a time. Where the store sits beside the kitchen and the two share the bulk grocery load we plan them as one problem, usually alongside the modular kitchen design work rather than after it, and where you want to see the room before it exists we put it through 3D visualisation, since a store is easy to misjudge on a plan and hard to argue with once you have seen the shelf runs at eye level.

The sanction side, and why it comes up

A store room inside an existing flat is an interiors job and stays one. The moment it is part of a new house, a rebuild or an added floor it becomes part of the sanctioned plan, and in Salt Lake the building authority is the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation, which is a different office and a different route from the New Town side. Area counted in the plan, lofts and the structural openings all sit on those drawings, and what is permitted varies plot by plot, so it must be confirmed for your plot rather than assumed from next door. For a plot where an old structure comes down first, which is common across the older blocks, Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation Building Plan Sanction for a Plot With an Existing Structure to Demolish in Salt Lake sets out the sequence, and Bidhannagar Building Rules for Salt Lake Homes covers the framework that shapes what you can plan internally. If the store is appearing because you are adding a floor, Vertical Extension Design in Salt Lake: Adding a Floor Properly comes first, since the structure decides the layout and not the other way round.

How the studio is set up, and why that changes this room

A store room gets designed badly through handover rather than ignorance, where a plan is made, the person who made it moves on, a contractor interprets it, a carpenter interprets the contractor, and by the time the inverter arrives nobody holds the logic of the room. Our structure is the direct answer, because the principal architect stays on the project through sanction and through site instead of passing it to a junior once the agreement is signed, and architecture, interiors and the Bidhannagar route sit with one team, so you are not carrying information between a draughtsman, a contractor and a carpenter.

The other half of that is money, because every option is put in front of you with its cost consequence attached, so when you choose a masonry shelf over a modular carcass, you see what it does to the number on the day you decide it. For the work this sits inside, our Salt Lake area page collects the residential projects on this belt and explains how we run interior design across Salt Lake, and Contemporary Full-Home Interiors project in Kolkata is an example of that category of work, as is Residential Building Project in Salt Lake.

When a different kind of provider suits you better

Worth saying plainly. If your store is a single built-in unit in an existing flat, no wall is moving, no service is being relocated and you want a well made shelf and shutter arrangement, then a good carpenter or a furniture brand showroom will get you there faster and cheaper than any architecture studio, and engaging a studio for that is paying for coordination you do not need. If all you need is a drawing for an office, a drafting service is the cheaper instrument. The structural trade-off is that those models are built around supplying a product or a document, so they are efficient where scope is fixed and narrow, and they have no mechanism for the case where the store turns out to sit on a drainage line, or where the loft changes what is counted on the sanctioned plan. If the question is actually about a commercial floor in the Sector V belt rather than a house, that is a different planning problem and Designing a Sector V Floor Plate Around How Your Team Actually Works deals with it.

Planning your store room

If you are rebuilding, adding a floor or doing a full-home interior in Salt Lake, the store is one of the first rooms worth settling and usually the last to get attention, and at the end of the day that order gets paid for every day afterwards. Bring us the plan, a photograph of whatever you are storing now, and a rough sense of the budget, and we will tell you whether this is an interiors job, a sanction job or a carpentry job before anybody starts drawing, so get in touch and we will take it from there.