How I Built a Modern Staircase in a 200-Year-Old Listed Georgian Villa
- Níall Hedderman
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
Some projects divide opinion. This is one of them.
A Georgian villa on the south side of Edinburgh. A modern, open-riser staircase built inside it. If you love it, you love it immediately. If you don't, you'll tell me I vandalised a historic building. But this post is not really about a staircase. It's about a question homeowners face all over the UK: what is the right way to make a contemporary change to a listed property?
I believe the phrase 'in keeping' gets misused. Applied thoughtlessly, it becomes a straitjacket that prevents good design and flattens a building's history into a single moment. But done well — when old looks old and new looks new — the two can be better together than either would be alone. This project is an example of how that can work in practice.
The House
The villa was built in the 1820s and is Category B listed — the Scottish equivalent of Grade II in England. The 20th century was not kind to it. It was carved up into flats in the 1960s and stitched back together in the 1990s, but that work was done badly. By the time I got involved, the house had multiple gas and electric meters, different heating systems, deteriorating windows and dry rot in the lower floor.
The house does have genuinely wonderful bones. There is a grand sense of arrival: stone steps rise to an entrance vestibule that opens into a parabolic central hallway lit from above by a large cupola. The drawing room — originally two rooms joined together in the 1990s — is a remarkable space. The kitchen had been sensibly relocated to the lower floor in that same round of work, closer to the rear garden. That arrangement made sense and we kept it.
What didn't work was the connection between the two floors. Part of the original stone stair survives at ground level, but most of the steps were ripped out in the 1960s and replaced with an unremarkable timber stair in the 1990s. That stair arrived at the back of a dark corridor. The kitchen below and the drawing room above meant a great deal of going up and down steps that felt unworthy of the house around them.
The Design
The clients wanted the two floors to work as one coherent home, with as much natural light as possible brought into the lower hallway. A bow-fronted room — two storeys tall with a sliding sash window on each floor — presented itself as the right location for the new stair. It had been used as a formal dining space below and a bathroom above. The original sash windows were beautiful and in good condition. They became the engine of the design.
The temptation was to copy what a Georgian architect might have done: a sweeping cantilevered stone stair, a mahogany handrail, wrought iron balustrade. I advised the clients against that, for three reasons.
First, you would be inventing a fictional history — pretending the new stair had always been there. Second, you would be spending serious money on something that, on close inspection, is a reproduction rather than an original. And third, you would be introducing a false narrative into a listed building, flattening 200 years of history into a single imagined moment. The original principal stair was already gone. There was no surviving fabric to reinstate. The honest answer was a high-quality contemporary stair.
That's where the open risers came from. Gaps between the treads allow daylight from the original sash windows to pour through the stair and deep into the lower hallway. That was the big idea. The detail evolved around it.
Early drawings showed winders at the half landing — wedge-shaped steps to keep the plan compact. As the layout developed, those were removed and the half landing was made larger, with each flight becoming longer and more generous.
The side walls give the stair its identity. They make it feel as if it has been slotted into the building from above — a piece inserted into the existing fabric rather than grown from it. Those walls support a mahogany handrail, a deliberate nod to the original joinery of the house, and are clad in Lunawood from Russwood. The vertical lines of the cladding create a pin-stripe effect that reinforces the sense of a slotted-in vertical element. The walls also conceal the stringer — the structural timber beam that supports the steps — which on a standard stair would be exposed at the side. Hiding it produces much more elegant proportions.
We originally considered lime-washing the Lunawood to blend with the plaster walls. Several samples were made and tested on site. None of them worked well enough, and in the end the dark timber colour was kept throughout. That turned out to be the right call: the stair now reads as a single coherent unit, almost like a piece of furniture placed within the room.
The first two steps are formed from the same material as the floor below — a decision taken early to ground the stair both practically and visually. Like a wedge holding it in place. The original intention was to use sandstone salvaged from repairs to the external walls; in the end, concrete blocks clad in the same floor tile were used, but the effect is identical.
The Technical Details
The open risers cannot exceed 100mm under the building regulations, to prevent a child from falling through the gap. The result is a down-stand bead on the underside of each tread that closes the gap without blocking the light.
The treads above the first two steps are solid oak. Structurally the boards must be no less than 30mm thick. They are glued together and the overall step depth must satisfy that minimum while keeping the profile as clean as possible.
At the half landing, a sheet of 17mm toughened and laminated glass fills the void between the two flights. It maximises the light from the upper sash window while being strong enough to resist someone falling against it. The glass sits in an aluminium channel bolted to a steel beam. Where steel meets aluminium, or where steel meets oak, a layer of bitumen paint was applied to prevent galvanic corrosion between the dissimilar metals.
The handrail is the most important element on any stair. It is the part you touch, so it has to be both reliable and inviting. I developed a square profile with slightly rounded corners that stands on a thin batten, allowing a hand to really grip it. The handrail runs continuously across both flights and the half landing, stepping up at the landing to remain within the required height limits of 840 to 1000mm above the pitch line. It extends 300mm beyond the first and last step as the regulations require. At the glass screen, a channel is cut into the underside of the handrail so it slots over the top edge of the glass for lateral support. The same handrail profile was used on the two other stairs in the house, ensuring consistency throughout.
Creating the new stair also solved a problem that is easily overlooked on larger renovation projects: where do all the pipes and cables go? The house was being comprehensively renovated at the same time — new electrics, heating, drainage and ventilation throughout. I incorporated service risers on either side of the stair to carry everything in an organised way. The boiler is in the room directly above, so the heating pipes, data cables and drains all run through here. There is room to add more in the future if needed. On any taller property, planning a service riser into the design from the outset is always worth doing.
The joinery was carried out by a team of Polish craftsmen I have worked with since 2019 on projects across Edinburgh. On a job like this, that established trust matters as much as technical skill. Before any cutting began, the joiners set out the complete stair geometry on site — every step drawn onto the stringers in pencil. A full-size chipboard mock-up of the step profile was then made and tested in position before the oak treads were cut.
Getting Listed Building Consent
How did Edinburgh's planners and Historic Environment Scotland agree to a stair like this inside a Category B listed building?
Policy was on my side from the start. Historic Environment Scotland publishes guidance called Managing Change in the Historic Environment. The section on New Design in Historic Settings is explicit: high-quality contemporary design is appropriate in listed buildings, provided it is well-considered and respects the host. That document is worth reading carefully before embarking on any listed building project.
The planning officer and a representative from Historic Environment Scotland visited the site together to record the interior as it then stood. I used that visit to talk them through the proposal in person and make the case directly.
The arguments were straightforward. The original principal stair was already gone — there was no surviving fabric to reinstate and therefore nothing to replicate honestly. The new stair would occupy a space where all the historic features — the curved walls of the bow front, the original sash and case windows, the shutters — would be retained and celebrated. The new structure is independent of the building and could in principle be removed in the future. And a pastiche stair would introduce false history into a listed building, which is arguably more damaging to its integrity than an honest contemporary intervention.
The planning officer was already familiar with my work in Edinburgh, which helped. Listed building work is, to a considerable degree, a relationship business. If the local authority knows your name, has seen what you produce and trusts that you will deliver something of genuine quality, you begin the conversation in a better position. That is not a shortcut. It is what you build over twenty years of practice.
The lesson for any homeowner is this: listed does not mean frozen. But you have to make the case properly, and you have to make it before you spend money on detailed design.
What Does Something Like This Cost?
For a bespoke stair of this quality, you should budget at least £15,000 plus VAT in 2026. That figure covers the joinery, the glass and the installation. It does not include structural engineering input, design fees, or the making-good of the surrounding walls, floors and ceilings.
That last point matters more than people expect. When we opened up this space we found that the original floor joists had been notched in the 1990s to carry the bathroom drainage above. The walls in the upper and lower rooms did not align with each other. The lower floor had dry rot and was stripped out entirely before a new solid floor was formed. On a project like this, the making-good can easily cost as much as the joinery itself.
If you are considering a similar project, my advice is to establish your joinery budget and then add a making-good contingency that is at least as large again.
The Result
The lower hallway is now flooded with light from those two original sash windows. The stair is unmistakably contemporary, and that is not a problem. The old looks old. The new looks new. The 200-year history of the house is legible in the building, not concealed by it.
If you have a listed property and want to know what is possible, or a period home in need of a significant intervention, I would be glad to help. Get in touch to discuss your project.
Photography: Katie Pryde Photography | Construction photographs and drawings: Capital A Architecture Ltd.
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