Terracotta Jaali Screens Made a 2023 Comeback on Kolkata Facades and Interiors

Somewhere around the middle of 2023 we noticed that a material we had used only occasionally in the years before, the perforated screen wall known across Bengal and much of the subcontinent as jaali, had gone from a niche request to something showing up on nearly every third client brief that crossed our desks, whether the client asked for it by name or simply described wanting dappled light, a sense of privacy without a solid wall, or a facade that did not look like every other flat-fronted tower going up around it in New Town and Rajarhat. We think it is worth tracing exactly what drove that shift in 2023 specifically, because jaali as a building technique is centuries old in Bengal, visible in the carved terracotta temple walls of Bishnupur and across rural Bengal's older brick architecture, and its return to contemporary residential work here was not a rediscovery of something forgotten so much as a specific, dateable moment when enough of our clients started connecting that heritage material to problems their modern homes actually had.

Where Jaali Comes From in Bengal, and Why That History Matters to the 2023 Revival

Bengal's terracotta tradition runs deep, most visibly in the temple architecture of places like Bishnupur, Kalna, and Vishnupur's Rasmancha, where entire facades were built up from fired clay panels carved or molded with narrative and geometric relief work, largely because the Bengal delta's alluvial soil offered abundant clay but comparatively little building stone, pushing generations of local builders and artisans toward terracotta as the region's signature structural and decorative material. The perforated jaali wall specifically, whether cut from stone in other parts of the subcontinent or built from terracotta and brick in Bengal's own vernacular, served a consistently practical purpose across all these traditions, allowing airflow and diffused daylight through an otherwise enclosing wall while screening direct view and direct sun, which in a hot, humid climate without mechanical cooling was not a decorative flourish but a genuine climate control strategy. What changed in 2023 is that this same practical logic suddenly mapped very cleanly onto problems our New Town and Salt Lake clients were describing to us in entirely modern terms, tight plot setbacks that left almost no privacy from neighbouring towers, west-facing facades taking brutal afternoon heat gain, and a general fatigue with the flat glass and plain plastered walls that had come to define most mid-2010s and early 2020s apartment construction in the area.

The Facade Applications We Built Through 2023

On the exterior side, the most common 2023 request we fielded was for a jaali screen wall in front of a west or southwest-facing balcony or a stretch of glazing, functioning essentially as a sun-breaker that cuts direct solar heat gain while still allowing the resident to see out and light to filter through. On one Salt Lake project completed in late 2023, we specified a terracotta jaali panel system covering roughly 140 square feet across two stacked balconies on the western face of a client's independent house, using a repeating geometric lattice pattern with individual openings around 3 inches square, mounted on a steel sub-frame set about 8 inches proud of the actual balcony railing to allow a maintenance gap and airflow behind the screen itself. The client reported that surface temperature on the balcony floor tiles during peak May afternoon sun dropped noticeably compared to an unscreened balcony on the building's opposite, unshaded side, and more importantly for daily comfort, direct glare into the adjoining living room through the sliding door dropped enough that they stopped keeping the heavy blackout curtains drawn through the afternoon, which changed how much natural light actually reached that room across the rest of the day. We have since repeated variations of this same detail on four more western facades through 2023 and into 2024, adjusting the opening percentage, generally somewhere between 30 and 45 percent open area depending on how much privacy versus airflow a given client prioritized.

Cost on these facade screens has run our clients somewhere between 450 and 750 rupees per square foot depending on whether we specify machine-pressed terracotta blocks, hand-molded artisan panels sourced through Bengal's remaining terracotta workshops, or a precast concrete jaali system, which is more economical and more dimensionally consistent but reads as visually flatter and less textured than genuine fired terracotta, a trade-off we walk every client through honestly since the concrete option can run 30 to 40 percent cheaper but does lose some of the warmth and slight irregularity that makes terracotta specifically feel handmade rather than manufactured.

Bringing Jaali Indoors as Partition Walls

The interior application became just as common through 2023, and in some ways more interesting to us as designers because it solves a different problem than the facade version does. Inside a home, a jaali partition wall lets us divide space, between a living room and a formal dining area, between a study nook and a passage corridor, between a pooja space and the rest of a room, without fully closing off sightlines, sound, or airflow the way a solid partition or even a half-height media unit would. On a New Town flat we completed interior work for in the autumn of 2023, we built a 7-foot-tall, 9-foot-wide terracotta jaali screen in place of what had been planned as a solid drywall partition between the living room and a small home office nook, and the client specifically wanted this because the office nook had no window of its own and relied entirely on borrowed light and air from the living room's balcony doors, something a solid wall would have blocked almost completely. The jaali screen let daylight from the living room carry through into the office through the day, and because the pattern we used had roughly 35 percent open area, someone working at the desk could still hear if a child called out from the living room without the isolating silence a solid door creates, while retaining enough visual separation that the office corner didn't feel like it was simply sitting exposed in the middle of the living space.

Interior jaali work runs lighter than exterior screens structurally since it carries no weather load, but it does need to be specified carefully around electrical runs and, in taller installations, some form of top and bottom channel bracing so individual terracotta units don't rely purely on mortar joints for lateral stability, a detail we learned to take seriously after an early, under-braced interior screen on a 2023 project developed a hairline crack at one joint within its first year, since resolved and now something we design against as standard practice on every jaali partition we build regardless of height.

Where This Sits Alongside the Rest of a 2023 and 2024 Kolkata Interior

Jaali's 2023 comeback did not happen in isolation from the rest of what clients were asking for in the same period, and we think the connections are worth naming. The same clients requesting terracotta screens were, within the following year, often the ones asking us to move their whole material palette away from stark white minimalism toward something warmer and more textured, a shift we cover directly in Why 2024 Was the Year Kolkata Swapped Stark White Minimalism for Warm Minimalism, since a terracotta jaali wall simply does not read correctly against a cold white-on-white backdrop the way it does against warmer plaster tones, wood, and brass fixtures, so the two trends reinforced each other on several 2023 and 2024 projects rather than arriving as unrelated requests. Jaali partitions have also shown up specifically in bedroom storage zones, including as screen doors fronting the walk-in closet layouts we describe in Before and After: The Built-In Wardrobe Gives Way to Walk-In Closets in Bigger New Town Flats in 2024, where a perforated jaali door on a dressing area lets borrowed light and air move between that zone and the bedroom instead of sealing it behind a flush solid door. And because jaali partitions frequently get used to screen mezzanine edges, loft fronts, or the underside of a duplex staircase in the kind of split-level and duplex layouts common on larger New Town plots, clients building these features often raise Vastu questions about the specific placement of such elements relative to the rest of the floor, something we address in Vastu Rules for Mezzanine and Loft Spaces in Duplex Apartments.

For clients undertaking a renovation on an older Kolkata property who are considering adding a jaali facade element or an interior screen retroactively, this is very much a renovation and remodeling conversation from the start, since retrofitting a jaali screen onto an existing structure means working out load paths and fixing details against walls that were not originally designed to carry or frame a perforated screen system, and we always begin that assessment with a site visit before quoting anything.

If You Have Been Picturing a Jaali Wall Somewhere in Your Home

If a west-facing balcony in your home turns unbearable by mid-afternoon, or you have a room that needs light and air but not full visual openness to the space next to it, a terracotta or concrete jaali screen is very likely the most elegant answer we can offer, and we would like to show you exactly how a pattern, opening percentage, and material choice would look against your specific wall or facade before you decide. Get in touch through our contact page and we can talk through where jaali would actually earn its place in your home.