Up the wooden hill

Stairs. An often overlooked part of the house, my mind turned to these when I saw this beautiful photo of some wallpapered stairs on the Apartment Therapy site.



It actually made me miss stairs, which sounds pretty absurd but perhaps isn’t considering I grew up in houses with stairs but have lived in stair-free flats in Spain for the past 6 years... Of course it’s not really having stairs that I miss, but all the silly stair-related memories that popped up; being naughty and being sent ‘upstairs to my room’ on many an occasion, only to linger on the 4rth step eavesdropping on the conversation that ensued, encouraging Sayda and Holly to get on a lilo and slide down the stairs with the result of both of them bashing their heads in on the radiator in the hallway, falling down the stairs after an ‘over indulgent’ night out at university and having to crawl to the phone on my hands and knees the next day to ask my parents to come and take me home, long phone conversations that took place on the ‘privacy’ of the staircase as the rest of the house was always too full of nosey people, my grandmother demanding that we took our shoes off before climbing the stairs lest we ‘wear the carpet out’ (said precious stair carpet was thick-pile, navy and royal blue with an ivy-leaf pattern – it was the 80’s after all), the stairs also provided a great landscape for Barbie-goes-mountaineering games as a child, the list goes on and most of the memories involve some sort of unfortunate accident. Anyway, here are some photos of 'stairs I like' - I forgive myself for this because it's Friday (except it's actually Wednesday now).

Ahh, the simplicity of it...(somewhere in Portugal I think)



Floating stairs from Jordi Vayreda



Stairs with beuatiful paper flowers from a Chanel runway




More wallpapered stairs



'Bookcase' stairs from a house in London, not sure how I feel about these. A great use of space but it looks a bit claustrophobic to me - plus poor books being kicked all the time.



Stairs with lighting. I don't think these are perfect but I do think the way they are lit and the blonde wood provide a great solution for an enclosed stairwell with no natural lighting (I lived in a house with a narrow enclosed staircase at university, and I can safely say that this is 100 light years better than paisley print carpet and a bare lightbulb hanging from the celing).



Beautiful art nouveau stairs from the Victor Horta Tassel hotel, Brussels



Stairs by Ross Lovegrove



Highly dangerous Swedish stairs



Industrial looking stairs made from wooden boxes



Pantone stairs. I feel these could have looked so good but they've gone for the wrong colour palate and haven't continued the design up the stairs.