Interior Design- The Foyer Staircase: Sunnybrook Farm



The final result: The foyer with the properly curved "flying" staircase against its curved wall. Nothing was easy, but all's well that ends well. The staircase is stained MinWax's Provincial

The first floor (the ground level is the basement level) has a dining room, foyer, and living room in the main house, and a sunroom and a music room in the wings. This floor has 11 inch ceilings.

The staircase becomes a problem:
We wanted the foyer to make a grand statement. As with the front steps, we had a long, discouraging time trying various arrangements of steps--straight run and various number and types of turns. The 11 inch ceilings seem to add problems: high ceilings are beautiful but making a long gracious “flying” staircase was eluding us. We took a pause.

We solve the staircase style dilemma:
One day, looking at staircases in a dollhouse shop, we realized that a curved staircase was the answer somehow, but I didn’t like the curve of the commercial stairs, plus we had 11 inch ceilings. Hmmm....

Commercial staircase

The only answer was to bash the commercial one, adding length, width and most importantly, cutting it apart and changing the curvature! I wanted it longer, wider, hugging a curved wall, and gently connecting the foyer with the second floor. The shop owner showed us how to remove, without destroying, the handrails and spindles. Cutting it apart was up to us.

We bought flexible 1/16 inch thick “airplane model” plywood and picked the right wall curvature. Then came the real work: cutting the stairs into the proper number of sections and then to reassemble and glue them into the new curve. Then I had to widen the stairs to 3 ¾ inches, etc, and etc.

Need something to add more height:
We built a two-step landing with a 90 degree turn at the bottom to make up the 11 inches.

Widening the steps:
This was easy. I added a new flexible backing to the staircase to the new width and then, every morning before I went to work, I rolled out a 1/8 inch thick strip of Paperclay and added it the wall side of staircase. This is the way I built up the width to 3 ¾ inches over a number of days. Now I had the width, but ugly treads and rises. The risers were easy to fix, I just sanded and painted them. To fix the treads, I cut stained flooring and glued it on.

Dry fitting the pieces. The staircase to the ground-level basement is behind this staircase.

I don’t think you can see the repairs in the ceiling where we cut and re-cut and glued back ceiling pieces with each new attempt at getting the “right” staircase. That was messy.

Curving the railings (or nothing is easy):
This was basically a lot of cutting and pasting of the stained railings, adjusting the height of the spindles, and putting them all back together, and attaching to the treads! This was a lot of trial and error and nerve-wracking moments!

Moving right along, but with the permanent tricky rail-spindle attachment yet to come. The wood on the treads worked out well.

Then I had to somehow connect all this to the second floor landing railing.

Railings and spindles are attached to the stairs and to the second floor railing and the curved wall is permanently in place.

The second floor curved railing was another, but smaller, challenge.

It's finally done!

The next post will discuss the easy part of the foyer – which was everything other than the staircase and was a piece of cake!