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The staircase is by its very nature a special component allowing us to get from one level of the building to another.

Escaping a two dimensional world and rising up into the security of your bedroom or the special excitement experienced by looking down on the world from your attic space is only made possible by the staircase. I would also argue that the journey itself, transcending another physical level is, well, uplifting.

Of course a staircase is more than a phenomenlocial exercise and is a piece of building structure that because of its special nature is nearly always built in a workshop, traditionally by a joiner who would use his very special carpentry skills to cut and fit the wood components together with wedges, glue and joints to form this “case” of wooden steps. It has to be strong and the technology has been honed over hundreds of years to give us this special building component.

From an architects or interior designers point of view the staircase can become a beautiful design feature. Making a virtue out of necessity and allowing this relatively expensive but necessary part of the domestic house to become an object of beauty is a neat trick. Of course the stair has to be located so that it communicates effectively with as much of the house as possible and is therefore usually quite central. However it is interesting that the usual location in the average british house owes more to history and the development of house design than pure practicality.

It is possible that the Italian Renaissance villa with the main reception rooms being on the first floor and the drama associated with “making an entrance” into what was called the piano nobile and the adoption of this architectural grand gesture by the Georgian architects in the UK led to the arrangement we now take for granted. The Georgian house with its impressive external steps up to the front entrance door and another even grander stairway to the living quarters of the town house or the poor mans version of this, the single stone step outside the front door and the stairway then directly inside the front door leading to the bedrooms. When you think about this arrangement, for the average house, this does not always make sense.

Anyway that’s history and it is worth questioning the traditional layout. Building Tectonics have been known to suggest the relocation of the stairway and it sometime is the key to unlocking a particularly difficult design problem.

Strangely it can be the key to making a loft conversion work successfully since getting the stairway into the loft comfortably without losing an existing bedroom can be greatly facilitated by rationalising the means of vertical conveyance namely the stairs. Quite often when houses have been extended once or possibly twice, the stairs end up being badly located and moving the existing stairs, albeit messy, can be very worthwhile.

Some families love the idea of connecting the upstairs to the main living area of the house which is often the kitchen / family room part of the house. This can be a problem, as to satisfy UK building regulations, your only means of escape cannot be via the kitchen.

Amateur designers often fail to allow enough space for the staircase and in particular spiral staircases take up more space than is usually anticipated. Other design aspects that have to be considered other than those mentioned above include designing for the removal of furniture, headroom, noise transmission and safety in use ( the correct height of the step and width of the tread and the pitch and protection from falling) and of course the structural stability which has been touched on earlier but is worth reiterating.

Notwithstanding all of the above, please allow me to end where I started by extolling the benefit of a well designed, well located staircase and it is a good designer who can integrate the necessary with the ideal.