Staircases We Love

The back staircase abuts a glass facade overlooking the backyard, allowing plenty of light into the kitchen area above. The art hanging on the wall is by artist Julie Thevenot.

Tasked with transforming a 93-square-foot brick boiler room into a guesthouse, architect and metalworker Christi Azevedo flexed her creative muscle. The architect spent a year and a half designing and fabricating nearly everything in the structure save for the original brick walls. "I treated the interior like a custom piece of furniture," she says.

Tsutsui continued the Oregon pine from the floor to the steel-reinforced cantilevered staircase, which appears to float above the floor.

Steel allowed Kunding to be playful with the staircase’s form.

Yvette Leeper-Bueno and Adrian Bueno’s home, on West 112th Street in New York, is recognizable by its two-story bay window angled to bring light and views into the dark, narrow structure. Seemingly a single, seamless unit, the stair is composed of two elements—treads and mezzanine—and held in place by two distinct strategies: The stairs are welded to, and cantilever out from, a series of steel tubes concealed in the walls; the mezzanine is attached on one side to a steel beam, and hung at two other points from rods attached to the roof structure. Photo by: Adam Friedberg

Argentinean materials, a roiling economy, and a pinch of personal tumult served as the recipe for furniture designer Alejandro Sticotti’s Buenos Aires oasis. The wood-and-steel open staircase wends its way up three stories, supported by a concrete structural wall embedded with PVC tubes and bare lightbulbs. Photo by: Cristóbal Palma