So you’ve spent countless months picking out your brand new hardwood floor. Now it is time for more fun. You have to start thinking about the hardwood stars that you will be required to install!
That sounds like a lot of fun. After all, hardwood floors are a stable foundation for an overall design. You want them to be as warm and inviting as possible.
The stairway you decide on needs to blend into the floor and be inviting as well. Subtle things like the grain direction, perceived strength and construction, wood contour, and finish colors and textures have a huge impact on the user’s perspective of quality and beauty in the finished stairway.
Our stair contracts provide you with some very useful information to consider as you plan on your upcoming staircase design.
Wood Grain
The wood grain direction is one of the strongest and most visual cues you have when laying out a floor into a stairway. This is because oru eyes love to find patterns and a soft flowing pattern of grain in a new pre-finished hardwood floor. But if this leads the eye into a space where the grain direction stops and runs perpendicular to the hardwood floor, it creates an abrupt barrier that disturb the overall flow and design of the space.
The first stair tread should have a grain that runs parallel with the floor to give people an invitation to continue. Bowed and curved steps are basically more grand and the convex shape tells the mind that the transition is soft and acceptable.
Construction
Simple stairways have a minimum number of elements and are great for designers when they want to put the emphasis of the house on the space. However, when you design a stairway with an overly simplified design the mind has concern for safety. A design may conform to code and may meet all the of the mechanical requirements, but do the users find it comforting and strong? That’s an important question you’ll have to ask yourself.
Always be sure to design a staircase that promotes a feeling of quality and stability, and factoring in elements that match the scale and quality of the rest of the design with a modified hand-rail design or thicker custom treads, that can provide an added touch of luxury and personalization.