Old Airport Road
Medium Height Storage in Old Airport Road: Low, Medium or Full?
A decision framework for choosing between low, medium and full height office storage, comparing capacity, sightlines, reach and floor impact.
Medium height storage — broadly 1200 to 1500 mm — is chosen more by default than by decision. It is the middle option, and the middle option gets picked when nobody has established what the storage is actually for. Sometimes it is genuinely the right answer. Often it is not.
Here is the comparison that should be made before ordering.
The three heights compared
| Low (750–1050 mm) | Medium (1200–1500 mm) | Full (1800–2100 mm) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Usable shelves | 2 | 3–4 | 5–6 |
| Running metres per 900 mm unit | ~1.8 m | ~3.2 m | ~4.5 m |
| Top surface usable | Yes, as worktop | Yes, standing height | No |
| Blocks seated sightline | No | Yes | Yes |
| Blocks standing sightline | No | No | Yes |
| Everything within reach | Yes | Yes | No — top shelf needs steps |
| Daylight impact | None | Minimal | Significant |
| Doubles as space divider | Weakly | Strongly | Acts as a wall |
Where medium height wins
Medium storage has one property neither of the others has: it holds a genuinely useful amount of material while remaining entirely within reach and still allowing a standing person to see over it.
That combination makes it the right choice for:
Storage inside a working area. A run of medium units between two teams stores a real quantity of files, divides the space, and does not make anyone feel walled in.
Departmental storage adjacent to the desks it serves. Everything is reachable without steps, which matters when the unit is accessed many times a day.
Rooms where full height would dominate. In a room under about 3 m ceiling height, a 2100 mm unit reads as a wall. A 1350 mm one reads as furniture.
Top-surface use. At 1200–1350 mm the top is a natural standing set-down — for a printer, for sorting documents, for anything done on your feet.
Where medium height is the wrong answer
When you need capacity. Full height gives roughly 40% more running metres per unit and per square metre of floor. If the driver is volume of files against limited wall, medium height is an expensive way to store less.
Against a blank wall. A blank wall can take full height storage. Putting medium units against it wastes the upper wall permanently.
Where you wanted a worktop. If the top will be used seated or leaned on, you want 900–1050 mm, not 1350 mm.
The mix most offices actually need
In practice a well-planned floor uses all three:
- Full height against blank walls and in a store room, holding archive and bulk
- Medium height within the working area, holding active departmental material
- Low height as team boundaries and shared work surfaces
Standardising on one height across a floor is the mistake. Each height solves a different problem.
Old Airport Road buildings
Office buildings along Old Airport Road include a good deal of established corporate space, often with substantial paper retention requirements from long-running operations. Where that is the case, the honest answer is usually more full height storage in a dedicated room, with medium height units in the working area for what people touch weekly. Trying to hold five years of records in medium units distributed around a floor produces a floor that is full of cupboards and still short of space.
Get the split right
Tell us your storage volume and how often each category is accessed, and we will propose the split rather than one height throughout. We manufacture all three at our own Bommanahalli workshop. Call +91 98860 03777 or email info@srirangainterior.com.
