Houses With More Than One Staircase

Houses can have more than one staircase for a variety of reasons. More often than not, it’s to enable two different classes of people to not meet each other, such as in this house with its “front” staircase and servants’ staircases. There’s actually also a third staircase connecting the footpath with the basement and used for deliveries. The first two staircases separate the house into those parts used by the owners and their visitors, and those used by the children, their nannies and servants. There’s no need for the lady of the house to visit the kitchen or even the children’s bedrooms. Going to or from the ground floor study or the first floor boudoir is where respective paths are most likely to cross. Otherwise, the only interaction that owners and their visitors will have with the servants would have been with the footman at the front door, the serving staff in the dining room and whenever the housekeeper or upstairs maid is rung for. History has many examples of houses like this. Offhand, I can think of Le Petit Trianon, Villa Savoye, Villa Stein …

And then of course are the large Victorian mansions that had staircase separation by marital status as well as by social status. In addition to the principal staircases and the “back” stairs, the mansion¹ Bear Wood that architect Robert Kerr designed for the then owner of The Times newspaper had separate staircases for men and women, separate staircases for bachelors and young ladies, and separate staircases for male and female servants. The only non-paired staircase is the staircase (on the upper left in each floor plan) for “Strangers’ Men Servants”. There’s a huge amount of architectural effort on display so that men and women (whether married, single, or complicated) aren’t forced to share staircases, but it’s nevertheless possible for anyone to access any space if its door has been left unlocked.

Kazuo Shinohara’s 1970 house titled Repeating Crevice² famously has two staircases but for reasons less explicit. The front staircase is used by the grandparents to access their rooms on the upper level (shown in pink in the middle image, below) and the rear one by the parents and their visitors to access the tatami (Japanese style reception room) via the living room and the central void. Movement in this house is carefully orchestrated. The two different circulation routes are separated and the glass wall on the landing at the top of the front stairs also separates them aurally but importantly, not visually. From that landing, it’s possible for the grandparents to see who’s going up the stairs to the tatami room to which they have direct access. A similar large internal window overlooks the two-storey dining room. Another smaller window overlooks the double-height foyer from their bedroom. The house is still using staircases to direct interaction between two types of occupant, but visual interaction is allowed even if actual crossing of paths is less likely. The two staircases are doing much more than the name of the house makes them out to be.

Over the period 1970-1980, Shinohara designed other houses with two staircases but, in the following three, he did so in order to create a double-height space splitting the house. There is no reason for this, other than an aesthetic one. This is the 1970 Shino House (1970). Each of the non-master bedrooms upstairs has its own staircase.

This next is Uncompleted House published the same year. The main entrance is at the top of the image – the north elevation. The staircase by the kitchen leads to two vaguely equivalent bedrooms upstairs but an additional door means the bathroom could be used as an en-suite to the bedroom on the south side. Two half flights of stairs lead up to the main living/reception room, effectively isolating it from the other parts of the house. I imagine that, upon entering, first-time visitors would be led to the stairs on axis.

The 1973 House in Higashi-tamagawa may also have been a house for three generations as it uses the void to separate a suite consisting of tatami room and bathroom, while on the other side of the upper level are the parents’ bedroom and a shared bedroom for two children. Once again, the internal street can be overlooked from windows on both sides of the upper level. Entrance on the north (to the left, below).

Of these four Shinohara houses, Repeating Crevice is unique for having a circular route, even if it is only the grandparents who have more than one way of getting from A to B. Other houses have been designed with staircases for implied exclusive use by other subdivisions of residents (Villa dall’Ava, House in Bordeaux …) but the Shinohara examples ostensibly add architectural device to the list of reasons.

Randomly accessed memory being what it is, this makes me think of UNStudio’s 1998 Möbius House. Published plans are seemingly drawn to stop us comprehending the house as a two-storey house with a staircase at each end of the upper level, rotationally-displaced corridor. What we have is one long staircase staircase just going up to the corridor and, at the other end of which is one (by virtue of a ramp) seemingly longer coming down. I’d forgotten about the one more leading nowhere, just for show but, now I think about it, it must be the two combining to make the architectural conceit of the mobius.

It’s all marketing under the bridge now but much architectural endeavour went into making us think this house has something to do with a Möbius strip – a new take on the inside-outside thing that’s preoccupied architects for oh about a century now. The horizontally-rotated upper floor suggests the loop of a Möbius strip and though a Möbius strip has only the one side, I seem to remember the house being described as going from open to closed to open again as one “circulates”. Some re-drawings of the plans even label the upper corridor as “circulation”. The “closed” part is the representation of enclosure as “inside” while being “outside” is alluded to by big glass as ever – as if “open” actually meant outside. Topographically, the house is a torus that’s been twisted to form a figure eight that (to nitpick) isn’t a Möbius strip, let alone its volumetric equivalent of the lesser-known Klein Flask where the outside changes to inside to outside again. Unfortunately, a Klein flask is an even less workable model for a house. (“Dammit – I’m still outside!”) The joke would be on us all if Möbius House was built for a Mr. & Mrs. Möbius.

Having said all that, I’m still keen to have more than one way to go up and down. There’s no need for it to be as regimented as say one stair going directly from the living room to the bedroom or bedroom corridor, and the other stair going from the bedroom corridor to the kitchen or breakfast room. This sounds more like tyranny than rationality or functionality. True, the two staircases could and probably would be used that way but it’s not necessary to use that as a justification. What was I doing in 2014 when I missed the Youth to Youth house designed by batlab? This bedroom seems designed to use the additional height of some very old apartment. In Budapest, I learn. (It seems to do the job quite well but it kill the space less if the underside of the stairs on the right was open.) The published project seems to consist of variations of this one image. An optimist might use the staircase on the left to end the day and the one on the right to begin it but having the choice is what’s important.

Having a fire-escape stair at each end of a corridor is, if it’s not already law, definitely good practice but having choices is good even when not escaping fire. Even single-level houses feel more spacious and comfortable if there’s more than one way of getting from one place to another. Large house parties are always better if guests can move from room to room without going back the way they came. Having two staircases might be a way of making even small dwellings feel less small and possibly even enable the various spaces to be used in more than one way. Different staircases could be used to differentiate how a room is to be used at any one time.

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 must be at least one gallery but this house has another one to create gallery symmetry.

The galleries are nice but adding another staircase would mean both could be done away with. However, having two galleries would mean that people at one end of a level would have alternate ways of going to the other end of the other level of the house.

I suspect the galleries are a compromise because, if there were another staircase (with or without a corresponding gallery), it’d be necessary to find another place for the kitchen and there doesn’t seem to be one. Having a kitchen in that space was more important than symmetry. This seems a strange compromise to make as a kitchen is no more than a source of water and a source of heat. The rest is storage and there’s no lack of storage space or even work surfaces in this space. Besides, the ceilings are high so there’d still be space under the stairs for a refrigerator, dishwasher, sink, cooker …

I found a better plan of that upper level. If the house had two staircases then it’d also be necessary to find another place for the master bedroom en-suite. Its current position makes sense in terms of plumbing but not in terms of symmetry. [Can a bespoke wc cistern really be embedded in that 10cm wall?] In the upper right of this upper floor plan, the second bathroom with its tiny shower has been split across the corridor. I don’t see why the en-suite couldn’t have been similarly dispersed. No matter. I chose this house to illustrate how there’d now be more choice for how to move around the house, that’s all. It probably wasn’t a good choice as there probably aren’t enough different places to be for the circulation advantages of two staircases to become apparent. Needs more thought.

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To end with, I’d like to share a project I took another look at yesterday. It’s a 2019 building called A&A Liam Fuji^{3 4}by architets Mt Fuji Architects and artist Liam Gillick – hence the A&A in the name. It’s essentially an artwork that’s rentable @ JP¥95,700 per night incl. tax but it defies easy categorization. Eventually, about 25 other hotel-artworks will dot the Japanese city of Okayama. The building consists of three displaced levels, each divided into quarters and with each quarter of each level accessed by at least one staircase. Let me try again. Three identical structural units divided into four quarters, are vertically stacked yet horizontally displaced and some stairs and landings added to connect the twelve spaces in the displacement gaps. Words can only describe so much. Same goes for the plans and sections for that matter. I’ll need to study them more to determine how many alternate routes there are, but this approximately 6-metre cube feels very large indeed because circulation is by staircases and vertical adjacency instead of by corridors and horizontal adjacency. (Mosei Ginzburg once said – with reference to the Type E apartment⁵ – that a staircase is merely an inclined corridor.) The roof is a rooflight. Overhangings are either solid, void or floorlight. There’s one door, one window, two ladders and about twelve staircases. There’s enough information below to find your way around the plans and sections. The diagram, section, plans and the photo of the front of the building all have the same orientation. I began from Hall 1, rather than the entrance. The section was very useful.

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Recently Revisited:

• Served and Servant Spaces
• The Maximum Dwelling: RESPECT
• The Inscrutable Apartment

1. https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2013/08/22/the-maximum-dwelling/ ↩︎
2. https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2017/02/06/repeating-crevice-revisted/ ↩︎
3. https://a-and-a-hotel.com/en/ ↩︎
4. https://www.onestory-media.jp/post/?id=3461 ↩︎
5. https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2015/05/25/1928-the-types-study/ ↩︎