How They Pulled It Off: A Twisty, Floating Staircase for a 14-Foot Ceiling

Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.

Hiding in plain sight in Greenpoint, Brooklyn—a neighborhood known for its railroad-style apartments and recently developed high-rise buildings—is a ground-level maisonette with a winding floating staircase. In terms of New York City apartments, this two-bedroom is a unicorn with a lofty, 14-foot-high ceiling and a private terrace with its own entrance. It’s the only unit of its kind in a six-floor residential building. 

INC Architecture & Design, the firm that designed 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge and the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport (among other architectural landmarks), handled every creative aspect of this property. "It was exciting for us as we don’t often get approached for a project like this," says Drew Stuart, INC cofounder and Construction & Development Director. "We took on the entire scope as executive architect, design architect, and interior designer for all the units."

For the ground floor unit, which is considered a retail-level space, INC saw an opportunity to create an elegant staircase that works with the large, windowed patio doors. (A legitimate retail space requires at least 14-foot-high ceilings; this ceiling line strikes all the way through to the back where the apartment is located. A bank occupies the front-facing retail space.)

"You want to pull in as much of that light in and bounce it off the wall," says Stuart. "The less intrusive the stairs, railing, and treads that are running perpendicular to the glass, the more the room fills with natural light."

Stuart says the staircase—roughly one and a half stories high—was pulled off with "really tight coordination in terms of getting all the landings and turns in" because the orientation at the bottom of the staircase is different from the top. Building code requires a landing at every nine feet of staircase rise—so the team had a more unique approach. "We were trying to get the landings to all be the same size for aesthetic reasons so we turned the thing three times to have three landings. It’s the tightest puzzle you've ever seen," he says.

The stringer, which is the backbone of the staircase that holds the treads together, is a four-by-six black steel tube. The railing consists of tempered glass and a black anodized aluminum C-channel that covers the edge.

After INC put their finishing touches on the architectural aspects of the apartment, Stuart’s partner Jean Lin, who owns the furniture design gallery and consultancy company Colony, furnished the maisonette for its new tenant. 

How they pulled it off: A staircase that seems to float

• Plan ahead: A floating staircase is held up with hidden anchors so there’s a lot of preplanning involved. "For big, concrete buildings, we have to put in embed plates that have to be well coordinated in advance," Stuart says.

• Get nimble: Because of a budget limit, INC ended up reworking their design. "We originally designed the staircase to have two stringers but because we were budget-conscious, we worked with a vendor who was willing to do a single stringer, which ended up lightening the heft of the stairs," Stuart says. 

• Think creatively to meet codes: Staircase construction requires certain codes. For one, the gap between each floating stair needs to be smaller than a four-inch diameter sphere. "Our trick was to make really thick treads to keep these gaps from being bigger than four inches," Stuart says. Landings are also required every nine feet of staircase rise, so the team turned the staircase three times to get those in.

• Use multiple vendors: You can save money using different vendors. Because INC hired one team for the staircase, and another for the floors, they considered every cosmetic detail, such as getting the stair treads to match the wood floor finish, even though the materials came from various sources. 

"The staircase is visible from every angle on the ground level so it was a huge consideration when we were doing the interior design," says Lin. "What is the light fixture going to be? Where is the art going? How do we address the negative space? When you’re walking up and down the stairs, what is the experience of that? So we decorated the house to bring the staircase to life as the focal point in the house."

Project Credits:

Architect: Drew Stuart, INC Architecture and Design

Interior Design: Jean Lin, Colony

Photography: Brooke Holm

Related Reading:

How They Pulled It Off: A Secret Stair Hatch That Seals Off the Living Space

How They Pulled It Off: A Massive, Coiled Staircase in a 12,000-Square-Foot Home in England