A staircase is a flight or series of flights of steps, together with its supporting structure, handrails and balustrade, that connects the floors of a building. Its principal parts include the treads and risers, the strings that carry them, the newel posts at turns and ends, the balusters and the handrail, and the staircase is often the grandest architectural feature of a house.
In England, Elizabethan and Jacobean houses introduced broad open-well staircases of oak, with massive carved newels topped by finials and heraldic beasts, and heavy turned or pierced balustrades. Later seventeenth-century stairs used twisted or vase-shaped balusters, and Georgian architects favoured elegant stone cantilevered stairs with wrought-iron balustrades and mahogany handrails rising through the hall. Victorian houses employed cast iron and machine-turned pine, often painted or grained. Staircase parts such as newels, balusters, handrails and complete flights are traded as architectural salvage and are valuable for restoring listed buildings, where original joinery should be repaired rather than replaced. Collectors also seek individual carved newels and balusters, which can be displayed as sculptural fragments or adapted into lamp bases.
