“Beautiful balcony looking over the palatial entertaining area”.
That would be a great place for seasonal decorations. Perfect spot for a Christmas tree, for example.
Except when you want to gather around the Christmas tree to unwrap presents on Christmas morning.... or god forbid you simply live to feel the cozy ambiance of the Christmas tree in your living room as you snuggle up with your family on the couch at night.
IMO, this feels more like a convenient display for something like a department store.
This would be a supplementary tree. There isn't enough width here for a full-sized tree. For example, my in-laws have gifted my wife hand-made felt Christmas ornaments every year. They were clogging up our main tree, so she wrapped a traffic cone with some green felt and made a smaller, entirely felt-themed, supplementary tree.
Or you could have an inflatable or stuffwd snow man. Or Santa. Or the Easter bunny. For Halloween you could have a ghost hanging from the ceiling, or a zombie, scarecrow, cloaked figure, pirate, whatever. I actually have a Halloween Tree that's a black dead-looking thing with orange lights.
Of if you have cats, that's a great spot for a cat tree. Or one of those slings that hangs from the ceiling.
Or how some people collect those squish Mallows: that would be a nice nook to store them.
Obviously these are all luxuries, but I think from this picture we can assume this is a pretty big upper-middle-class house.
Everyone is in the back and you send the smallest child to pick up and drop off the presents.
Everyone Sitting in the hallway would be the worst part.
What I'm thinking is removing the railings from around the outcrop and have the railing to all the way to the stair (so that you can't walk onto the outcrop anymore). Then the outcrop is the perfect place for a model of some kind. Like a countryside train model or a city model or the likes. Something that is just for looks cause there's no practical reason to walk onto such a tiny outcrop. It'd be a great use of the space and a nice place to display such a thing such that anyone walking up or down the stairs can appreciate it from different angles.
If removing the railing is not an option, that's a perfect spot for some hanging plants. (looks like it has enough light as well). Now I want a stairway that I can put a train model in.
Make it even better, instead of keeping it a flat surface, cut a slope down towards the stairs. Then you get to wander around the model. See it from not just several, but dozens of points of view both vertically and horizontally. Really turn it into a unique part of the house.
This is the kind of "feature" that would get me into model trains. Having the ability to circle it, going up and down at the same time, would be quite awesome indeed
I suspect that part is like that because there's a closet right there, if you were to slope it the closet space might suffer. I'm 100 percent behind your idea though.
I’m so confused why this was necessary. Why not just have a straight railing across? You could use the space for decorative purposes - it can be easily accessed and cleaned from the stairs. This is just bizarre.
Now there is just enough space for a bed. In case you really don't want that one friend to visit again.
I honestly wouldn't mind a spot like this id definitely find a use for it. It's odd sure but you could have some fun with it.
So it comes we a ready made dog kennel! Just add the door. (I'd say it would serve as a playpen as well, but I'm sure that would be some sort of safety violation)
Never forget the heroic actions of the Titanic and its battle against a tube of villains.