Questions to ask before you buy a staircase

Most people put more thought into picking a sofa than the staircase the whole family walks up and down ten times a day. That is backwards. A staircase is the most overlooked safety feature in the house. You would not lowball your kid's car seat, so it is worth knowing what to actually ask before you buy the thing everyone climbs every single day.

You do not need to become an expert. You just need to ask a handful of questions that most sellers would rather you didn't. A good supplier will welcome them. A cheap one will get vague. That tells you most of what you need to know on its own.

Here they are.

Is it actually bespoke, or just made-to-order?

"Bespoke" is the most abused word in the trade. We honestly hate it. Almost every "bespoke" staircase sold in the UK, ours included, is really high-quality made-to-order: built from stock components to confined dimensions, usually to within a few millimetres. That is completely fine for most homes. But it is not the same as truly bespoke, which means designed freely to your space with no fixed menu, and it costs meaningfully more by design.

There is also a difference between a bespoke product and a bespoke service. An independent supplier who works across many manufacturers can genuinely tailor a solution to you, matching the right maker to your job, even when the end product itself is made-to-order. A single manufacturer can only ever sell you their own stair.

Ask: "Is this truly bespoke, designed to my space, or made-to-order to set dimensions? And how much of it can I actually change?" If the honest answer is made-to-order, that is fine. What matters is that they tell you.

What am I actually getting?

When you buy an "oak staircase," you are often getting far less oak than you think, and nobody points it out.

• Newel posts. A solid oak newel and a "wrapped" one are both sold as oak. A wrapped newel is a jointed timber or MDF core with a thin oak facing. The cap on top is often there to hide the end grain, which otherwise looks like a Battenberg cake. Ask whether the newels are solid or wrapped, and if wrapped, how thick the facing is. A 3mm veneer is not the same as an 8 to 10mm solid facing you can sand back and keep for life.
• Do the newels reach the floor? A newel gets much of its strength from being carried down and fixed to the floor and the structure below it. A "floating" newel, one that stops on the stair instead of reaching the floor, is a weak point unless it has been specifically designed and fixed for it. Online stair designers assume your newels sit on the floor, so if yours cannot, that is on you to flag: the configurator will not ask, and it is not the maker's fault if you never told it.
• Treads and risers. "Engineered" treads and veneered risers get supplied all the time without the customer being told. Ask: are the treads solid or engineered, and the risers solid or veneered?
• Finger-jointing. Short lengths of timber glued end to end. Fine where it is under paint. It shows through under a stain or clear finish, so a quality maker uses solid clear timber where it will be seen. Ask if any visible timber is finger-jointed.

None of these are crimes. Laminated and engineered parts are often more stable than solid. The problem is being sold one thing while thinking you bought another.

What is the timber, really?

Buying "pine" is like a chip shop that will not tell you the fish. Pine is not one thing. Is it whitewood, redwood, radiata, taeda? They look and behave differently, and knowing which one lets a good maker match the timber through the whole stair for consistent colour and grain. A cheap one will not bother.

Then there is where it has actually been. "American oak" or "European oak" tells you the species, not the journey. A lot of timber is shipped abroad for processing and comes back before it ever reaches your hall. That is not automatically a problem, but you have a right to know the full journey, not just the label. Ask where the timber is sourced and where it is processed, and whether they can show a chain of custody from forest to workshop. For what it is worth, we only work with manufacturers who source direct from Europe. It costs a bit more. We sleep better.

Was it measured and dry-fitted properly?

Here is the one almost nobody knows to ask, and it matters more than who fits it. A good install mostly takes care of itself if the factory did its job first.

• Was it professionally measured on a proper site survey, or built off a form you filled in?
• Are the handrails cut to length, or is that being left to whoever turns up to fit it?
• Was it dry-fitted at the factory before it shipped?
• Did the measure allow for your floor finishes? The rise is worked out finished-floor to finished-floor. If the tiler or carpet fitter has not been yet and nobody allowed for it, every step ends up the wrong height, the bottom or top step is off, and the risers are no longer equal. That is a trip hazard, and it fails the regs. A professional measure accounts for the finishes at both ends. A form you filled in usually does not.
• Is there a fitting tolerance, and finger clearance on the handrail? A stair built dead to the exact wall-to-wall dimension either will not go in or cannot be scribed to a wall that is never perfectly straight, so it needs a small tolerance. And on the wall side the handrail needs clearance so your knuckles do not scrape the wall every time you go up. Cheap jobs skip both.

Dry-fitting, which means assembling the whole stair once in the workshop to check it before it goes out, is the most overlooked step in the industry. A single loose suction cup on a CNC machine can throw a whole flight out, and if it was never dry-fitted, nobody catches it until the fitter is stood in your house trying to make good a factory mistake they never should have had to. Ask if it is dry-fitted. If they look blank, that is your answer.

Will it actually fit, and can you get it in?

Two questions people forget until the lorry turns up.

First, access. Can the staircase, or the sections of it, physically get into your property and round to where it goes? A long straight flight or a pre-built stair has to come through the door, down the hall and round the corners. Bespoke and pre-assembled stairs especially have been known to arrive and not get past the front door.

Second, the space itself. A stair does not just drop or flip into a stairwell, and the dimension that catches people is not the one you would guess. Take a 90mm newel post on a 32mm string: the newel overhangs the string by around 29mm on each side. So the real width the stair needs between your walls is the flight plus that overhang, not the flight on its own. Measure to the string and you can be an inch out, and it will not fit. This is exactly the sort of thing a proper site measure catches and a form you filled in does not.

Is it safe, and will it be signed off?

A staircase is a structural, safety-critical part of your home, and new work has to meet Building Regulations. The exact rules differ across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but the ones worth checking are simple:

• A 100mm sphere must not pass through any gap in the balustrade, so no gap over about 99mm. This applies whether or not you have small children.
• Guarding on the stairs and landings in a home is at least 900mm high (840mm on the flight itself in Scotland).
• The pitch cannot be steeper than 42 degrees.

For the full figures across all four nations, see our guide to UK staircase building regulations.

And the bit people forget: new or relocated stairs need Building Control approval and a completion certificate, which your solicitor will ask for when you come to sell. Ask: "Does this meet current Building Regs for my part of the UK, and do you handle the Building Control sign-off?"

Why one quote is half the price of another

You cannot really price-match a staircase, because two quotes are almost never for the same thing. On paper they look identical. Underneath, they are often miles apart. Before you trust a cheaper number, check it is actually quoting the same stair:

• Is the timber the same sectional size? Thinner strings, lighter newels and smaller spindles cost less and look almost the same in a photo. In the flesh, and in ten years, they are not the same stair. Almost nobody thinks to ask this, and it is one of the biggest differences in price.
• Where does the timber come from, and is it the same species and grade?
• Are the handrails properly tenoned into the newels, or just butted and screwed?
• Does it include delivery?
• Did the company measure it themselves, or is it built off figures you gave them, with the risk sitting on you if they are wrong?
• If there is a landing, does it include the joists, flooring and skirting, or just the flight? That one line can be the entire difference in price.

Line those up and the "cheaper" quote often turns out to be for less stair, not a better deal. That is why we do not price-match, ever. It is not stubbornness. The only way we could match a cheaper price is by dropping our timber standards and our product quality, and we are never going to do that. Match the price and all you have matched is a lower specification, and then it is not the stair you actually wanted.

The honest bottom line

Once a staircase is in, a bad decision is expensive to undo. Cutting corners on it is the kind of saving that turns into a bigger bill later, and unlike most things in a house, this is the one the whole family uses every single day.

You do not have to care about any of this. Plenty of people just want the cheapest option, and that is their call to make. But if you do care, these are the questions. Ask them of anyone, us included. The ones worth buying from will give you straight answers. The rest will get vague, and now you will know why.