If you’re renovating your home and looking for a way to transform tired or mismatched stairs, stair cladding with wood is one of the most impactful upgrades you can make. At Kite, it’s been a core part of what we do for years and we’ve spent that time perfecting it.
Why Homeowners Choose Wooden Stair Cladding
During a renovation, it’s common to have a staircase that looks worn, dated, or finished in a different wood to the rest of your flooring.
The options most people consider are:
- Painting: cheap, but rarely looks great long-term
- Carpet: practical, but breaks the visual flow of your home
- A stair runner: a reasonable middle ground, but still interrupts the continuity of your flooring
- Stair cladding with timber nosings: the best way to match your staircase to your flooring
At Kite, we’ve clad hundreds of staircases using timber nosings: either bullnose (rounded, for a more traditional look) or square (for a contemporary, modern finish). The results are good. But, we’ve always felt there was a better way.
The Problem with Traditional Stair Nosings
After completing hundreds of stair cladding projects, we identified five consistent issues with conventional nosing systems:
- Colour inconsistency: Nosings and planks often come from different oak sources, making a perfect colour match difficult. This is especially noticeable on mid-range floors where staining isn’t always an option. It’s something our clients (who can be slightly OCD…in a good way) notice.
- Visible bevels: Many nosings have a 1 or 2m bevel between the nosing and plank. It’s a small detail, but it prevents a truly seamless finish.
- Height variation between batches: Subtle differences in nosing height can cause the nosing to sit slightly proud of the plank.
- Limited coverage: Standard nosings typically only extend 70mm into the tread. In our view, this doesn’t create enough of a flow with the timber.
- Solid steps aren’t the answer: We explored solid timber steps, but found they move with changes in humidity, are extremely difficult to work with around stair winders, and require greater build-up thickness. They also often came unfinished, in a different oak to the flooring, which created oiling challenges.
Introducing StairFlow: Our Continuous Stair Cladding System
Because we’re never satisfied with “ok”, we developed our own solution: the StairFlow system: a continuous wooden stair cladding system that eliminates the problems above and creates a truly seamless finish from floor to staircase.
StairFlow is available in three configurations:
- The Closed System: Ideal for enclosed staircases with a stringer (side edging). Corner steps sitting outside the stringer can be neatly mitred for a clean finish.
- The Open Waterfall System: Designed for open staircases, where the tread and riser flow seamlessly up the full height of the staircase.
- The Open Tread System: For open staircases where the design features a single solid tread.
We’re continuously refining and improving the StairFlow system. You can see images of a recent closed system installation below.
The above staircase was fitted in Kensington, for our client, Atto Quarto.
This staircase was installed in Balham, and flowed over the treads and risers with continuous timber.
Stair cladding projects can get quite technical, so if you’re looking for something more than “ok”, get in touch and we can talk you through the options. We can do video calls, or better still, visit us at our studio in Shoreditch, 5 Hackney Road.
