Complete Restoration of Staircase and Stunning Ash Handrail

The complete restoration of this staircase was quite an undertaking. It was part of a complete house restoration on a beautiful house in Hove, Sussex. The house had 4 stories and this original staircase ran from the top floor to the ground floor. The house had previously been used as a care home for the elderly so all the handrail had been ripped out, all the edges of the steps and moulding had been hacked off and a wall had been built right thought the middle of stairs.
Once the wall was removed we noticed the long center section of the stair case was in bad shape and bowing a lot. Instead of building a new one and wasting the original we removed the old staircase stripped it to bits and rebuilt it replacing some bits but using a majority of the original one. We also supported it from underneath using long strong timbers to take the bow out that had appeared over the past 150 or so years of use.
Once the staircases had been secured and stripped back we started the re-build. We replicated the all the traditional mouldings in our workshop and remade all the caps for the edges and corners of each step. We also had to replace a lot of the sections of curved wooden skirting and stair parts as these had become a bit battered over many the many years of action the stairs had seen. Once all the moulding had been attached we moved on to the handrail and spindles.
The new handrail was a single piece handmade handrail which went from the ground floor right to the top. Not meaning it was made from a single piece of wood but meaning it had no newel posts, it was entirely supported by the spindles and being fixed into the wall at the top. The spindles were turned to match one of the neighbours who still had the original. The handrail was handmade from American ash and once installed all that was left to do was apply a finish.
The client wanted to handrail to help tie together the beautiful grey oak flooring and the creamy coloured carpet on the stairs. To achieve this the handrail was washed using a grey stain that sank into the grain. The entire handrail then had to be sanded back to reveal the original wood colour on most of the rail but leaving the grain showing the grey patterning. The rail was then finished in a hard-wearing wax and polished to an extremely smooth finish.

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