Twenty-two stairs, and no two alike

Nothing between the treads. You see straight through the flight to the floor below, and the stair reads as a series of separate planes rather than a solid object. It is the form that keeps a room feeling open, and the one that punishes any error in setting out, because every gap is on display.

The structure sits entirely in the stringer. On a curve that means a rolled steel spine carrying each tread from a single edge, with the provisions for fixing hidden inside the section. Nothing is bolted through the face of a tread.

Rise consistency matters more here than anywhere else. With an open riser the eye reads the gaps as a rhythm, so a sixteenth of an inch of drift over a flight is visible from across the room.

A solid face between every tread, and an outer string turned to one continuous surface. Done properly the whole flight reads as a single piece of material that happens to be walkable, with no joint, shadow gap or fixing anywhere on it.

The difficulty is the finish, not the frame. A closed riser hides the steel but shows every imperfection in the skin over it, so the plaster or stone has to be worked on site over days rather than delivered in panels. Every joint closes dry.

It is the quietest stair we build. With the risers closed there is no drumming underfoot and no line of sight through the flight, which is why it suits a formal hall better than an open one.

Stone changes the engineering before it changes the look. A marble tread at sixty millimetres weighs four times what timber does, so the stringer, the fixings and the floor build all have to be worked back from the slab rather than the other way round.

We buy the block, not the slab. On a curved flight the veining has to run continuously from the bottom step to the top, which means every tread is cut in sequence from one piece of stone. Book-matched, or it is not worth doing.

Limestone, marble and quartz all behave differently underfoot and in wear. We will tell you which one suits a front hall with a dog and three children, and which one belongs in a room nobody walks through.

A stair in a house has to do more than look right in a photograph. It is used in the dark, in socks, carrying things, by people of every age in the family, and it has to be quiet enough that somebody coming down at midnight does not wake the house.

The setting out is the hard part. It has to land square to the door, keep its rhythm past a window, and clear a light fitting that is almost always fixed before we arrive. We cut the strings to the room as built, not the room as drawn.

Almost everything else is open. Open or closed riser, stone or timber, glass or forged metal — a private commission is where we have the most freedom and the least tolerance for a stair that only works on paper.

A commercial stair carries an order of magnitude more traffic than a house does and is inspected against a harder standard. The loading, the fire rating, the slip resistance and the handrail continuity are all set before anybody discusses what it looks like.

It is also the work where the stair is doing a job for the building. In a lobby or a gallery it is the thing people photograph and the thing that tells them where to go. We take on the surrounding plasterwork, joinery and ceiling as one package so the junctions are ours rather than somebody else’s problem.

Programmes are longer and the co-ordination is heavier, but the engineering is the same discipline. Steel rolled to a radius, welded seamlessly, finished so nothing shows.

Everything else on this page is cut, rolled and welded. Ironwork is shaped by hand, one bar at a time, by somebody who has spent years doing it. No two pieces come out exactly the same, and that is the point of it.

We can design a pattern for you from scratch, or you can send us a photograph or a drawing of something you like and we will recreate it, adjusted to fit your staircase and to meet code. We draw the pattern against your elevation at full size before any metal is cut, because a design that looks right on paper is often wrong once it is standing at 36″ beside a stone tread.

The same shop makes gates, railings, screens and window grilles, so the ironwork at your entrance and the ironwork on your staircase can be made to match.

Ironwork is powder coated in one of our 34 colours, or painted on site after installation in any Benjamin Moore colour. Gold, brass and copper details are hand painted on site by an artist.