Preserving History: Staircase Restoration

In most New York City townhouses, the staircase is situated along the same wall as the front door. This means that when you enter the home at the parlor level, the first thing you see is the staircase.

Our office takes great care when planning this space to ensure that the experience of moving through the building is beautiful from the moment you walk in. When possible, we strive to preserve the historic newel posts and staircases, giving new life to the craftsmanship of the past.

In a Carroll Gardens Passive House, combining passive house detailing with daylighting and historic preservation created a low-energy, low-embodied carbon strategy for upgrading the parlor entry. Our clients wanted to keep the parlor staircases, wood wainscotting applied to the plaster wall, and plaster crown molding.

Widening the space between the staircase and the stair hall allowed natural light to pour down from the skylight to the parlor entryway. In order to preserve the original wainscotting, we incorporated the staircase itself into our passive house treatment along the party wall. Because the plaster walls and treated wood wainscotting were airtight already, we were able to use them to reduce infiltration of air, bugs, and dust from entering the house through the party wall.

Sometimes removing historic items doesn't make sense, either because the clients love the details or for waste reduction purposes. In order to ensure occupant safety in the new, wider stair hall, Andrew Fishman of SMR Craftworks handcrafted an extension of the newel post on site, allowing the clients to keep the newel post they loved from the original house. Working with the right team is an important step, and Andrew's woodworking background, skill, and patience allowed the staircase to be everything we had envisioned.

The historic staircase was one of the few elements we were able to salvage from this Carroll Gardens Brownstone. A previous conversion of the building in the mid-1900s to a multifamily home covered the original staircase in linoleum with metal nosing protectors, faux paneling, and a thick layer of black paint atop the wood handrails and newel posts.

When we stripped these away during our renovation back to single family, we found that the staircase was in surprisingly good condition. Although the stair treads and cove moldings needed to be replaced after a century of wear, the rest of the stair remained intact for refinishing. The team at TPG Inc. was able to restore the newel post and handrails and open up the stair hallway on the parlor level. These modifications allowed the historic staircase to become a central design element on the parlor floor and helped preserve the impossible-to-replicate historic quality of the house.

Even when a staircase is beyond repair, the right team can remove rails, spindles, and newel posts, restore them, and reuse them on a new staircase that matches the original. In this Brooklyn Heights Anglo-Italianate townhouse, that's exactly what we did. The team at Kleen Construction built a new staircase which matches the original almost exactly, preserving its historic character. To round out the restoration, the original railings, spindles, and newels were refinished and reinstalled.

One of the benefits of rebuilding the staircase is the opportunity to select better finishes. Historic staircases often have treads made of pine wood, which is soft and wears easily over time. In this house, we replaced the treads with white oak, which is a harder material and matches the rest of the flooring throughout the house.

In this Carroll Gardens townhouse, we wanted to restore the original staircase while keeping its original proportions intact.

At some point in the building's history, a varnish had been applied to the stairs. Over time, the old varnish gave the mahogany handrail and pine treads a reddish-orange appearance. We decided to stain the newel, handrail, and treads a darker color to avoid fully stripping the wood and to restore the character of the beautiful historic staircase. The secondary newel at the stair going down to the lower level was recreated to match the existing post, which originally supported a much lower railing. Because the newel post was so intricate, Atlantic Stairs and MLZ General Construction worked closely to recreate it. The overall restoration of the stairs involved a careful balance of patience and skill, ensuring that the process removed as little of the original detail as possible.