Opening Up a Dark Stairwell With Glass and Oak

This one is a good example of a job that changes a house far more than its cost suggests it should. Nothing structural moved. The stairs are the same stairs. What changed was what you can see through.

The problem with a spindle run

The landing had one window and a full run of painted timber spindles standing between it and the stairwell. Individually a spindle is slim. Forty of them in a row, viewed at an angle as you come up the stairs, are effectively a solid wall. The upstairs hall was reading as a corridor, and the stairs themselves felt narrower than they measured.

The owners had assumed the answer was a bigger window or a rooflight. It usually is not. Before spending money on the building fabric, it is worth asking what is standing in front of the light you already have.

Taking the old balustrade out

Spindles are normally housed into a base rail and a handrail, which in turn are housed into the newel posts. Coming apart is straightforward enough, but it has to be done without wrecking the newels or the string, because those are staying. We take the handrail off first, then the spindles, then the base rail, and the fixing housings get filled and sanded rather than plated over.

Worth saying plainly: the stairwell has an open drop the whole time this is happening. On a household with children or pets in it, that means the stairs are closed off at the end of every day and the guarding goes back on before we leave, not at the end of the job.

Glass, and the rules that come with it

The panels are toughened safety glass held in brushed stainless clamps bolted through the string. Glass balustrades are not a case of ordering panels to the opening size. Guarding on a domestic stair has to meet the heights set out in the Scottish technical handbooks, and no gap anywhere in the guarding may allow a 100mm sphere to pass through, which governs the clamp spacing and the gap at the bottom of each panel as much as the glass itself. We set out for those figures first and let the panel sizes fall out of them, rather than the other way round.

Clamped glass also needs a handrail. It is not there for decoration; it is what you actually take hold of, and it gives the panels a continuous top fixing.

Why oak, and why finished on site

The handrail is oak, sanded and finished in place. Against the glass and the black doors, the timber is the only warm material in the stairwell, and it stops the whole thing feeling like an office fit-out. Finishing on site rather than fitting a pre-lacquered rail lets us ease the joints and the returns properly, so the rail runs as one continuous piece under your hand instead of a series of lengths.

The doors went black at the same time. That was not part of the original brief, but once the balustrade was open the landing could carry a stronger colour, and swapping the doors while the decorator was already on site cost very little extra.

Three days, and what to expect

Three working days on site, plus the lead time on the glass, which is the long pole in this kind of job because the panels are made to the measured opening. Measure, order, and fit once the panels land. Anyone offering to do the whole thing inside a week from first phone call is guessing at the glass.