Sushant Lok is builder floors, and a good number of them are no longer homes. Clinics, dental practices, small studios, boutique offices and salons have moved into the ground and first floors while families live above. So we are often doing a commercial fit-out in a residential building, which is a specific situation with its own rules.
Commercial work in a residential building
A clinic on the first floor of a builder floor has neighbours who live above it, and that changes how the work is done rather than what is built.
The noisy part - drilling, cutting out old fittings - happens early in the day and is got out of the way. The shared stair is cleaned at the end of every session, because glass dust on a stair people walk on in bare feet is how a job gets stopped.
And the work has to finish. A partition cannot be left half-standing overnight in a building where other people live, so we size the day to what will genuinely complete rather than starting something that carries over.
Clinic glass is specified differently
There are a lot of clinics here, and the detail that matters is where the privacy sits.
In an office, a frosted band goes at standing eye level. In a consulting room that is the wrong height, because the person on the other side of the desk is sitting. The band goes at seated height instead. It is a small thing that is obvious once it is said and is routinely got wrong.
The other one is the door. A waiting-room door takes public-level use, so it needs a commercial floor spring rather than a domestic closer. The two look identical on the day they go in. The difference appears around month eight, when the lighter one begins to slam - which in a waiting room is a real problem rather than a cosmetic one.
The lift, and what fits in it
Builder-floor lifts here are small. Many take a panel no more than about six and a half feet on the diagonal, and some floors have no lift at all.
So the lift car and the lift door are measured before anything is designed, and where there is no lift we measure the stair turn instead. Toughened glass is made to size and cannot be cut down afterwards, so this is the measurement that cannot be got wrong.
Where a full-height run is wanted and the lift will not take it, we build it as two panels with a slim vertical connector. It is a normal, deliberate detail here rather than a compromise, and it is invisible from a few feet away.
