Mezzanine

A mezzanine is an intermediate level inserted between the floor and ceiling of a story — the balcony office over a shop floor, the sleeping loft over a living space. For zoning purposes, mezzanine space generally counts as floor area, so the insertion spends FAR budget just as a full story would; treatment details follow the current rules rather than intuition.

Mezzanines recur in records questions: added informally, they can put a building's real floor area ahead of its recorded floor area, surface at inspection as work without a permit, and complicate certificate-of-occupancy comparisons. A loft level is architecture to its occupant and arithmetic to the Resolution.