Find Staircase Design

Thinking Stair Design?

When designing a staircase, interior designers have a great deal of scope to make a feature within the building.

Stairs are more or less permanent and therefore need a great deal of consideration before they are designed and built. They have physical safety considerations along with their aesthetic value.

So here you will find some questions to ask yourself before putting pen to paper and design your master staircase! These questions and design process become second nature once you have designed several stairs, but it is always a good prompt for when you have a difficult stair case to design.

Some of the things to consider are:
- Who is going to use the stair?
- What is the stairs primary purpose (accessible, minor, secondary, etc)?'
- Is it going to be a grand feature?
- What is the maximum and minimum width you have to work with within the building?
- How steep will it need to be?
- What will it look like? Theme, permanent materials, easy clean, industrial, indoor, outdoor?
- How many landings will it require to be a comfortable stair to climb?
- Can you use an open or closed riser ?
- The ideal height of the riser and the depth of the tread?
- And on and on it goes?
- Beautiful Stairwell, where are the handrails?

The good thing is that most of the questions can be answered quickly by using your local building codes. They have strict rules as to the stair width, head height, tread width, riser height, and distance traveled before landings are required, balustrade spacings, handrail types and height.

So that is the first place to start, work out what type of stair you need in your building by law, i.e. accessible, minor or secondary. Then all the minimum and maximum measurements will be listed. You can then have a look at your space and start planning from there.

Once you have worked out the legal structural requirements, you can then concentrate on what it will look like