Awesome Floating Staircases

• Thespian24601
  April 13th, 2008 at 4:56 pm

  Fun, does anyone know if they are working staircases?

• Ali S.
  April 13th, 2008 at 5:18 pm

  Neat. However, it seems to take up alot of space in that room. :s

• Lea
  April 13th, 2008 at 6:03 pm

  *dies from dizzieness*

  I feel like I’d fall off, but that’s just me. Cool design though.

• World's Most Beautiful Woman
  April 13th, 2008 at 6:17 pm

  Those staircases are a work of art. As lovely as they are to look at, they are only for the young and nimble.

  We have staircases like that in our home - fortunately, no one else has any reason to go upstairs to our bedrooms
  … but it is only a matter of time that mother nature will catch up

• Terry
  April 13th, 2008 at 6:42 pm

  A furniture deliveryman’s nightmare!!! My queen size bed goes up stairs.

• CheeseDuck
  April 13th, 2008 at 7:29 pm

  MC Eschers fantasy house?

• Louisa
  April 13th, 2008 at 7:58 pm

  The staircase is cool but they should be taken out and shot for painting the exterior that hideous shade of blue. Poor neighbors.

• DDT
  April 13th, 2008 at 9:01 pm

  An architects dream, a builder’s nightmare.

  There’s a reason why stuff like this only works on paper, because how are you going to get any appliances, mattresses, furniture, etc. up the set of stairs?

• Tom
  April 13th, 2008 at 9:14 pm

  The house must be a giant smurf trap. Those stairs probably lead right to a cage in Gargamel’s workshop.

• Alannah
  April 13th, 2008 at 9:52 pm

  The inside looks great. The outside looks like a blight on the landscape. I bet the neighbors were pissed.

• jessleigh
  April 13th, 2008 at 11:34 pm

  At first I thought I was looking at a staircase with a part that slides in and out. Then, a second later, I thought it was two diffeent views of the same staircase. I was very confused. I need to read before I examine the picture.

• ted
  April 14th, 2008 at 5:10 am

  Somebody had a sale on blue paint. Very disturbing.

  The stairs are nice, but an obvious example of form over function.

• tripleX
  April 14th, 2008 at 5:55 am

  They are definitely inspired by communal stairways you find in Dutch cities. Many houses from before the 1950s have communal stairways like this going up about 3 to 4 floors.
  In time the bottomside of most stairs were plastered to a smooth surface because of fire prevention laws.
  To move furniture in your apartment you use a rope and pulley. There is a hoistbeam on every roof.

• empty-minded
  April 14th, 2008 at 8:50 am

  I think I would get myself killed one morning.

• c-dub
  April 14th, 2008 at 12:40 pm

  Everyone understands that these are just spiral stairs that are just clad in an interesting way, right? I don’t mean to take anything away from the architects, but some comments here make me think that people don’t even get how they work.

  tripleX has it right. Urban houses in the Netherlands often don’t rely on the stairs for moving large items; gantry beams over upper-story windows are used to lift and lower bulky items like mattresses and appliances. It makes perfect sense: why design a building around a need that arises only every year or two? We build too much waste and fat into our housing in the US, and the Dutch are far more clever and capable than we are when it comes to designing both homes and cities. They have too little land to waste any of it to careless design or cheap construction. Here, we can just keep sprawling out further and further into the landscape, so we regard buildings as disposable consumer goods. While we’re wrapping wood 2×4’s in toxic vinyl, they’re wrapping cast concrete in terra cotta tiles.

  As far as the aesthetics of the blue exterior go, to each his/her own. You might not want to look at their blue penthouse, but they might not want to look at the soul-deadening monotony of your neighborhood.

• Terry
  April 14th, 2008 at 6:30 pm

  I’m looking at the way the gables are finished and I cant see any allowance made in the design for a hoist beam.
  Architects do make really basic mistakes all the time.
  Where I live, hoisting your furniture up a rope would entail a nightmare of health and safety issues. They wouldn’t allow it if you lived on a public road (danger of injury to the public).

• c-dub
  April 16th, 2008 at 11:38 am

  Terry,

  I couldn’t say for sure that there is some provision here for hoisting, but that is the typical approach in Dutch cities. (There wouldn’t be gantry beams in these gables in any case, since those are penthouse structures: you’d only be able to lift materials off the roof terrace, not the street.) And hoisting isn’t as big a deal as you might think. I’ve hoisted pianos and other large items up the exteriors of buildings in a few cities, including midtown Manhattan. It’s actually easier over public property than private; you just have to make a call or two, and follow certain safety precautions. I would imagine it’s even easier in Holland, since it’s so commonplace – and since they aren’t nearly as litigious as we are in the US.

• tripleX
  April 17th, 2008 at 7:32 pm

  The Didden Village link is a slideshow. There you see that the stairs are in the apartment below the terrace. The blue house doesn’t have floors. Probably there is also a wider entrance to the roof from the communal stairs.

  @c-dub: You are right. In Holland you don’t have to call anybody before hoisting your furniture. Except maybe some friends with strong arms.

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