Houses With One Staircase
Houses having only one stair going from the hallway to the upper floors seem like a hangover from houses such this one where, upon entering, guests were immediately ushered upstairs to the drawing room. Even before neo-Palladianism, having the staircase in front of the front door was probably an affectation owing something to the European piano nobile. Lesser levels of townhouse simply did without the servants and the back stairs for their exclusive use.
Even when townhouses downscaled, the staircase continued to ascend from close to the front door despite the “reception room” being the first door opening onto the hallway as in the plan at lower left, below. The staircase descends into the least used part of the house but this positioning does have the advantage of making the upper level corridor shorter. Often, the length of that corridor is little more than the length of the stair and will lead to two or maybe three bedrooms and a bathroom. Nobody gives a second thought to this configuration. Even modern terraced house layouts such as the one at right below, have difficulty moving away from this placement of the staircase. Do people really rush down the stairs and out the front door? Do people really come home and immediately go upstairs? If one is only going to have a single staircase, then wouldn’t it be better more centrally located? In passing, a staircase immediately in front of a front door is bad feng-shui because one’s luck is supposed to rush down the stair and out the door but, as with some other aspects of feng-shui, there may be some more pragmatic reason underlying this codification of best practice.
Not all houses are descended from a noble lineage with the reception rooms on the level above the entry level, but these two houses above seem to want to keep the staircase as a hallway feature even if it’s not in the best position for moving around the house. Whether contemporary of not, even much larger houses like to keep the staircase as an architectural feature designed to impress people upon entry. Having an impressive split staircase (that guests never use) in front of the front door is almost mandatory in the more expensive Emirati villas. I suspect movies have a lot to answer for.
I must have been trying to think of what an alternative might look like. Last night I was watching Yasujiro Ozu’s 1951 film Early Summer. Most of the action took place in a two-storey house supposedly in Kitakamakura, and the well-used stair was simply sandwiched between two walls, neither concealed nor made a feature of. Downstairs, it linked to a corridor connecting to the downstairs rooms while the upstairs end connected to a corridor connecting to the upstairs rooms. This isn’t unusual but, even though the downstairs corridor led to the entrance (genkan) it wasn’t made a show of. Not making a feature of staircases could be a way of getting more of them into a house. In this house – or at least in the movie – guests were always being ushered upstairs into one of the rooms that may well have been used as a bedroom at night. The stairs were simply there to be used and people used them without thinking.
A similar example from Western vernacular is those houses known as two-up-two-down. The staircase connects the two most used parts of the house but it can only do this because the house isn’t large and there aren’t that many different places to be anyway. However, life remains organized into upstairs and downstairs. These houses don’t have a piano-nobile lineage. One thing I don’t like about these plans below is having to pass through the equivalent of a cupboard to get from any room to another.
It’s not necessary to make a staircase into a feature but nor is it necessary to out of one’s way to conceal them. Oswald Ungers’ 1995 House Without Qualities has much in common with the two-down-two-up plans above in that one would always be aware of going from space to space via something not worthy of being seen. These stairs and, by extension, anyone using them are outside the conceptual framework of the house and this seems a bit sad. This little house is a thorough working through of a single idea but, given that symmetries are so important, I think the house could be improved by a second staircase, rotationally symmetrical with the first. Having only one staircase means there needs to be at least one gallery but this one has two to maintain the symmetry.
It’s not that the galleries are unattractive – they’re actually quite nice but one of them has been added only for the sake of symmetry. Adding another staircase would mean both could be either kept or done away with. If they were kept, people at one end of the level could have two ways of going down to the lower level at the other end of the house.
I chose House Without Qualities to illustrate how two staircases offer more choice in how to get from A or B to C or D. It may or may not turn out to be a good choice to introduce next week’s topic of Houses With Two Staircases as I have a feeling this house might not have enough places to want to get either to or from for another staircase to make much of a difference.
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