A Custom Staircase, Turned by Hand: A Pin-Top Build in Atlanta

Last weekend I stood at the bottom of the spiral staircase in the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe and just looked up. It rises twenty feet to the choir loft, makes two full turns, and was built without a center post to hold it. People have argued for over a century about who made it and how it stands. What stayed with me was simpler than the mystery. A staircase, when someone gives it real thought, stops being a way to get upstairs and becomes the first thing you see and the last thing you forget.

That is the way we approach a custom staircase. It is the piece a home is organized around, and it deserves to be built like one.

A Pin-Top Custom Staircase Built for a Home in Atlanta

Last year a family in Atlanta came to us wanting a stair that felt handmade from the first step to the landing. Not assembled from catalog parts. Turned, fit, and finished by hand, with newel posts and balusters made on the lathe in our shop.

We worked through the design together and settled on a pin-top profile to carry through the whole run. The pin top is a turned detail that caps each post and repeats down the line, so the eye reads the stair as one continuous piece rather than a set of parts bolted together.

Red Oak Newel Posts and Over 150 Turned Balusters

We turned the newel posts from red oak at an extra-large five inch by five inch profile. At that size they read as anchors, substantial enough to ground the stair at every turn and landing instead of disappearing into it. Heavier posts also change how the stair feels under your hand. There is no flex, no wobble, just solid wood doing the job it was cut for.

The stair starts with a traditional volute, the gentle scroll that curls the handrail down and around at the bottom step. From there a custom red oak handrail runs the length of the entry stairwell, carried by more than 150 tapered maple balusters, each one turned to match.

The hardest part of a job like this is not any single post. It is the corners. Every time the stair changes direction, the pin-top profile has to continue without a break, so the rhythm never stutters. We kept the detail consistent through every turn, top to bottom, so the whole stairwell reads as one unbroken line.

Finished for Contrast

For the finish, the clients wanted the structure to stand out against the rail. We painted the balusters a light tone and stained the handrail and newel posts a deep, dark brown. The contrast does the work: pale verticals carrying a dark rail and dark posts, so the shape of the stair is the first thing you notice from across the room.

A staircase like this is architectural woodwork in the truest sense. It is structure and furniture at the same time, built to be walked on every day and looked at for a lifetime.

If you are working on a home, or designing one for a client, and you want a staircase built and finished by hand rather than ordered from a catalog, take a look at our architectural woodworks or start a conversation with us. We would be glad to talk through what is possible.