Dutch Stair Winders

I saw the post by Jeff, The Revit Kid the other day. The inspiration for his stair video is often referred to as a Dutch Stair. A couple years ago I met Bart, a Dutchman with HOK in San Francisco, while doing some training and he asked specifically about the same configuration. He said that it is quite common in his county. I commented that I didn't remember ever seeing it before.

I was staying at the Galleria Park Hotel a few blocks from the office and that very same evening I found it convenient to use the stairs to get down a couple floors instead of waiting for the elevator. There are two elevators and one was getting replaced so it took a bit longer than usual to get one. Guess what kind of stair condition I found as I started down...yes...the very same configuration!!

Later that same year when I went home to visit some family I was poking through some of our family photo albums from when we lived in Holland. Guess what stair we had in our house...yes...same configuration!! My memory isn't as good as I remember!

Since I didn't take any copies of the photos or take a picture of the stair at the hotel I thought I'd search Google's Images for Dutch Stair Winders and these are some of what I found.

This stair and the layout of their flat is very similar to the one we had in Amstelveen (outside Amsterdam). I thought I'd take a stab at the stair that Jeff did in his video but do it using Boundary and Risers instead of the run tool. Here's my take.

I also found a little bit of information that looks like it is a scan from a book using another nice google search. The book says that the Dutch used these stairs so much that they caused the appearance of block and tackle on the outside of homes. These were used to lift furniture that couldn't make it up the stairs to higher levels and passed through windows instead.

After finishing the video above it occurred to me that I didn't explain why I turned off the Up/Dn labels or why there is no arrow. So this VIDEO does that job! You can listen and watch here.