A handsome staircase is always the glory of any home interior. It is also subject to many onerous contemporary code requirements, and requires the highest level of finish carpentry in the house. Planning ahead is all important. Many carpenters and not a few architects have heard me say that the best way to design a house is to design the handrail first, then the rest of the stairs, and then the rest of the house will fall in around it. I’m joking—or at least people laugh at me! But after all, how many of us haven’t faced the miserable puzzle of squeezing a code stair into an inconvenient (or worse) space? So it’s important to design the stair before you build it.
