December, 1918 
23 
STAIR-RAILS, SPINDLES and NEWELS 
Three Important Details that Create the Atmosphere and Charm 
of Any Stairs—Their Period Evolutions 
HAROLD DONALDSON EBERLEIN 
“The stairs likewise to 
the upper rooms, let 
them be . . . 
. . . finely railed in 
with images of wood.” 
—Lord Bacon. 
I N Lord Bacon’s 
own house at Gor- 
harabury, near St. Al¬ 
bans, Aubrey tells us, 
“was a delicate stair¬ 
case of wood which 
was curiously carved; 
and on the post of 
every interstice was 
some pretty figure, as 
a grave divine with his 
book and spectacles, a 
mendicant friar, and 
not one twice.” 
If the great Lord 
Chancellor could find 
it within him to bestow 
constructive thought 
upon the intimate de¬ 
tails of staircase de¬ 
sign, it surely beseems 
us, too, to pay some 
heed in the same di¬ 
rection, especially 
since it works to our 
individual profit. 
A balustrade with 
its spindles, its hand¬ 
rail and its bounding 
newels, is by its very nature a deco¬ 
rative feature. It cannot help being 
so. It is for us to see to it that it is 
good decoration and not bad decora¬ 
tion. The difference is sometimes 
gauged by scarcely more than a hair’s 
breadth. Like every other feature 
subject to the constant changes of 
style evolution, spindles, hand-rails 
and newels are peculiarly sensitive in¬ 
dices and faithfully reflect the tone of 
(Above) Early 
18th Cent 
Dutch type 
rail 
An example of late 17 th 
Century, double-bellied 
spindles, found at St. 
George’s, Bermuda 
Plain iron spin- 
with brass 
a French 
type 
each successive mode. 
Perhaps it was be¬ 
cause of this sensitive 
quality that, in the 
Victorian decline of 
domestic architecture, 
the staircase fell to a 
lower depth of banal¬ 
ity than almost any 
other individual fea¬ 
ture and became a 
perfunctory contriv¬ 
ance of fantastically 
turned mahogany or 
walnut newels, “mean 
and starved balusters 
of varnished pitch- 
pine” and ‘ ‘ s t e e p 
flights of steps which 
turned in a well care¬ 
fully excluded from 
the light.” 
In analyzing the 
situation we must dis¬ 
tinguish between the 
wholly physical or 
structural features— 
position, form, dimen¬ 
sions, slope, measure¬ 
ments of risers and 
treads—w h i c h may 
not be changed with¬ 
out more or less con¬ 
siderable labor and 
expense, and the par¬ 
tially decorative features—hand-rails, 
spindles and newels—which may very 
easily be replaced. 
The most generally satisfactory 
measurements for treads and risers are 
treads \2 l / 2 " broad, risers 6" high; or, 
treads 12" broad, risers 6%" high. 
(This measurement means from top 
of tread; the projecting nosing will 
of course make the face of the riser 
(Continued on page 58) 
Late 11th Century type 
of double-bellied spin¬ 
dles and turned newel. 
“Norwood,” Bermuda 
