Musings on Stairs: Practical, Sexy and Dangerous

By Bill Primavera

The Home Guru

While stairs provide a very practical function as a means of ascending or descending from one level to another, they can be dramatic architectural statements in a home, from soaring, floating staircases in a central hall to modern circular stairs, winding around a column to a higher floor.  Did you ever wonder why circular stairs wind counter-clock wise when all of us tend to do things in a clock-wise pattern? Read on to find out.

From castles to humble cottages, stairways have allowed more living space under the same roof by providing a means to get to another floor.  Unless you live in a ranch-style home or a one-level apartment or condo, you climb stairs.

Some of us love the transition from one living space to another (“I can’t sleep on the same floor where I eat,” one buyer client told me), while others, especially our more mature citizens, seek senior community living that boasts “no steps.”

Besides their architectural and practical contributions to a home, stairs also add greatly to the statistics of accidents, even death, in the home.

The staircase can be the scene of high drama as well.

In the classic movie “Gone with the Wind,” every dramatic turn takes place on stairs. Scarlett first spies Rhett at the foot of the staircase she’s climbing at Twelve Oaks. Then, after civil war breaks out, she shoots and kills a “dirty” Yankee as he menacingly approaches her on a staircase at Tara. And, oh, we all know that sensual scene when Rhett scoops up Scarlett in his arms and bounds up the staircase two steps at a time, setting hearts aflutter when the Hayes censorship office was still very much in effect.  It wouldn’t have been nearly as effective had Rhett just escorted her across a room.  

In a subsequent scene in the film, Scarlett attempts to shove Rhett down a staircase, but he steps aside and she herself takes a nasty tumble to the bottom of the stairs. 

All too often, many of us take a dive down a stairway.  Maybe it’s because we’re in a different mode of balance when we are shifting our weight up or down.  Actually, if you’ve noticed, it’s easier to climb steps than to go down them, even if the physical effort is greater when we climb.  My theory is that we achieve better balance on the balls of our feet when climbing.  We seem not to be so sure about which part of our foot to place on the step going down, especially for people with feet that are larger than the width of the tread accommodates. 

I’m personally very conscious of the possibility of accidents on the stairs, perhaps because of an imprinted memory. When I was less that two, my mother tells me that I opened a door to the basement and plunged down the entire steep staircase, hitting my head on the concrete floor at the bottom. My mother screamed, thinking I was dead, but obviously I survived. In later years when I would behave oddly as a teenager, my mother had an excellent excuse to say, “That fall on your head when you were a baby must have caused some damage!”

And when my own daughter was at a play date with other girls at a neighbor’s home, I remember the panic and fear when I received that call saying that she too had fallen down a flight of basement steps.  She too is all right. Maybe it’s a generational thing.

Tragically enough, more than 15,000 people die each year as a result of falls, and as many as 1,300 of those take place by falling down steps.  Additionally, many people suffer injuries on stairs which are frequently not reported, making injury statistics harder to pin down.

Interestingly, many accidents happen when there is an uneven step in a series. Actually, this had been done intentionally in the distant past as a security measure to trip up thieves when entering or leaving a home.

Steps are traced back as far as 6,000 BC, mainly to get from one outside elevation to another with greater ease. The most recent application of this same principle is the opening of the 800 granite steps constructed along the Appalachian train on Bear Mountain. I can’t wait to get to them to try them out.

Now here is the reason that circular or curved staircases are designed in a counter-clockwise pattern.  As we know from old Errol Flynn movies, in the Middle Ages, it was critically important to safeguard the castle.  With stairs designed intentionally in a counter-clock wise fashion, the defender of the castle, on a higher level of the stairs, could swing his sword freely in the open space to his right, but his enemy below would keep hitting the wall to his right with the same action. 

The subject of stairs is very broad. This column muses about the history, drama and danger of steps, but sometime soon, I’ll write about the styles and options available to homeowners today, as well as a piece about the building of stairs. For now, still in dramatic mode, I’ll climb the steps to my bedroom, fantasizing that I’m swinging a sword along the way.  But, I’ll be very careful as I do it. 

Bill Primavera is a licensed Realtor® (PrimaveraHomes.com), affiliated with Coldwell Banker, and a marketing practitioner (PrimaveraPR.com). He can be emailed at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or reached directly at 914-522-2076.

Follow him on Twitter for housing market updates at Twitter.com/HomeGuruNY.