Taking steps

Before we moved into the house I knew that the stair arrangement would have to be altered to reduce the feeling of them cutting the house in two.  As there is no entrance hall for the front door the only option available to us was to treat the dining room (middle room in the ground floor) as a kind of entrance hall or lobby.  This could be achieved by taking away part of the wall separating the stairs and dining room and thus opening up the staircase.  The stairs will in effect become part of the dining room rather than wedged in between two quite narrow walls.

How the stairs are treated when they become visible in the dining room was another question.  Originally I considered cranking them around 90 degrees so that you step down into the dining room rather than straight onto the front door.

There would have to be either a small landing created or the steps would rotate around.  The landing idea was quite appealing as it gave the stairs additional character and created a nice feature.  Further thoughts around this developed into constructing a thin timber and glass screen at the end of the existing staircase, so upon entering through the front door this feature screens the stairs from view.

I would finally reject these ideas as overly complicated and unnecessary, but I still like the concept and maybe one day I can use this somewhere else.