Deck Railing in Bromley, KY

Bromley (ZIP 41016) is narrow deep lots with the houses close together, so a deck here is generally long and not wide. That shape does something to a guard that a square deck never does: the two long runs are parallel, they are close, and from anywhere on the deck you are looking at one of them through the other.

Two identical grids at that distance do not read as two guards. They read as one confused one. The near balusters and the far balusters are at the same spacing but at different apparent widths, so they beat against each other and produce a shimmer that moves as you walk. Anybody who has looked through two chain-link fences knows the effect. On a deck it makes a simple guard look busy and it makes the space feel narrower than it is.

It is avoided by making the two runs different, which is also cheaper than making them both elaborate. An open infill on the run you look out through and a solid or close-boarded lower panel on the run against the neighbor gives the eye one thing to read instead of two competing ones. Wider post spacing on the far run does the same job at no cost at all. Either way the deck reads as long and open, which is what the shape is good at.

We draw both runs on one elevation rather than one at a time, because they are only ever seen together.