Hauz Khas is design studios, small agencies, cafes and clinics, almost all of them working out of houses built for families. Add Hauz Khas Village, where the lanes are genuinely too narrow for a delivery vehicle to stand in. The work here is not technically hard. Getting the glass to the room is the hard part, and that is what we plan first.
Why we ask which lane before we quote
In Hauz Khas Village the panels are carried the last hundred metres on foot. That is not an exaggeration and it is not unusual here.
So the size of the panel matters more than anywhere else we work. A carried panel has to clear the lane, the doorway, and usually two flights of a narrow stair with a turn. Toughened glass cannot be trimmed on site to make it fit, and when it breaks it breaks completely, so we do not force one round a corner and hope.
What we do instead is design the run to the access. Where a single panel will not make it, we split it with a slim vertical connector. You will not see the joint from a few feet away, and you will not have a broken panel and a week's delay either.
Studios in converted houses
The offices here were bedrooms. The rooms are already divided, the ceiling steps between them, and there is often a beam exactly where the glass wants to go.
So we measure the room rather than working from a plan. Each panel is cut for the room it goes in. Where the ceiling drops, the glass follows it, and where the floor slopes - which it usually does in a house this age - we set the glass line off the finished floor rather than off a level line on the wall.
This is why we will not quote more than a single panel from a photograph. In a building like this a quote from a photo is a guess, and you would find out on fitting day.
Cafe and restaurant fronts in the Village
The Village fronts are a different trade again. They take heavy public use, they are opened and shut every day, and they matter to how the place looks.
A public entrance door goes on a commercial floor spring with matching lock and handle. The floor spring is the part set into the floor that pulls the door closed, and the difference between a proper one and a cheap one shows up in month eight, not week one.
Work on a front usually has to happen before opening, so we start early and clear out before service. And anything that changes the face of the building will need the owner's agreement, and often more than that in a conservation-sensitive area. Start that conversation before the glass is ordered, not after.
