Staircases and Landings

The staircase in a Gothic Revival house was an important feature of the entrance hall linking the ground and first floors, great attention was given to the design of the stair parts with care to the design of the baluster spindles newel posts and finials and it the stair way made an architectural statement as well.  Staircase towers housing spiral staircases added to the asymmetrical structure of the building, often finished in a square tower or a steeply pitched roof with a finial or weathervane at the top.  Light would filter into the stairwell via narrow lancet windows.

Pugin designed a staircase tower at the end of one wing of his house, with impressive carved and turned stair parts staircase at  St Marie’s Grange, but he later found that an entrance staircase hall with well designed carved baluster spindles newel posts finial staircase placed in a more central position provided a better plan and allowed more convenient circulation to the main rooms on the ground and first floors.  The main staircase that he designed at Scarisbrick was fitted into a small rectangle, which was lit from above.  With its ‘spindly scaffolding well designed  spindles balusters  newel post finials it was, as Mark Girouard observes in The Victorian Country House, Pugins ‘highly personal version of the continuous-newel staircases with their richly carved decoration of the stair parts of spindles balusters newel posts finials of the early seventeenth century’. At his later home, the Grange, he placed the entrance staircase hall in a tower with a lookout at the top.  The staircase had a most unusual well designed carved turned stair parts on the balustrade balusters spindles newel posts finials made from oak.

In a more traditional hall, the grand wooden staircase with their richly decorated stair parts of baluster spindles newel posts finials sweeping up to the first floor dominated the room.  These large, open stairwells were designed to impress and were therefore seen as a rich source of decoration. Especially the design of the baluster spindles  Scott, in his Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture, advocated the Elizabethan baluster panel or spindle style of staircase, with its ‘bold, carved moulded string,  perhaps carved with running foliage, armorial bearings, mottoes, or inscriptions’.  In staircases of  ‘a high degree of decoration’, he also suggested the use of inlaid woods.  Polished oak or les or newel posts in mahogany carved baluster spindles side-panels were also embellished with other carved Gothic motifs, on the baluster spindles which echoed the design of the  rest of the hall or were in the shape of a medieval arch.  In America, the sides of these staircases were also decorated with carved  or with painted or stencilled panels.

Balustrade Spindles and balustrade panels as stair parts were formed either of individual panels or balusters spindles newel post finials from ornamentally turned carved wood in floral or Gothic shapes or; as Scott wrote, of carved arcading, tracery or continuous scroll-work.  Later in the century stair parts of carved balusters spindles began to appear, inspired by those used by Scott on the grand staircase at the Midland Hotel, built from 1868 to 1877.  this staircase with its magnificent designed stair parts was designed in the Venetian Gothic style and was dramatically cantilevered with Gothic tracery.  Handrails would usually be ‘massive, to fit well to the hand’, and of a smooth hardwood, such as oak or mahogany, ending in a prominent newel post.  The newel post finials would often feature mythical animals, such as a griffin, or be surmounted by a decorative brass lamp or ‘possibly, by figures or the supporters of the arms of the proprietor’.

Bizarre designs of stair parts baluster spindles finials newel posts finials were not out of place on a Gothic revival staircase, as can be seen on the baluster created by Burgess for the staircase in the fifteenth-century octagon tower at Cardiff Castle: its top is in the shape of a crocodile, which to someone descending the stairs, seems to be looking at a baby crocodile on the rail beneath.  At the bottom of the rail is a helmeted or muzzled loin, a figure symbolising the Bute family’s royal connections.

Smaller terraced houses and villas had more modest staircase, placed at the end of the entrance hall, with a broader, curved bottom step to add importance.  However, even ordinary staircases had carved balusters, spindles newel posts finials which were either painted or of polished wood, with wooden handrails and newel posts.

Polished wooden stairs would either be left uncarpeted or have a central runner fixed with ornamental brass or iron carpet rods.  On simpler stairs of a lesser- quality wood, the treads on either side of the runner would be painted in a rich shade of brown.

Unlike Victorian neo-Classical houses where the drawing room was on the first floor, and the main bedrooms on the upper floors, Gothic Revival homes normally had the reception rooms on the ground floor and the bedrooms on the first, with servant’s quarters on an upper floor.  Entrance hall staircases therefore led up to the bedrooms, which were reached either from the first-floor gallery off the main hall or from a large wood-panelled landing.  Staircase towers usually opened into corridors or, as in Pugin’s St Marie’s Grange, on to rooms which opened out of one another.  Large landing windows provided light, or, if this was a problem, an overhead skylight could be added, as Pugin did at Scaribrick, to bring in light from above.