Dutch Stair Winders - Part II

A comment in my previous post asked about stringers that are exposed. Since I took the easy way out and said that most of these stairs are tucked away inside walls it is only natural that someone would like to do it the hard way!

In my reply to the comment I mentioned a few options that come to mind: In-Place Family, Walls and Edit Wall Profile, Railing with custom profiles or just accept the way the boundary/stringers are created by Revit (yeah I know that last one isn't very tasty). Here's an image of the result for the stair using an In-Place family. It's late and I was lazy so I only did one side, that and the other side is still buried in a wall, that's my story anyway.

I created a VIDEO that shows what I did. You can listen and watch here instead.

Another approach might be to build it as a component family. Use the basic stair tool to provide the typical representation of the stair but build a more exacting version in the family editor. This version can be placed so that 3D views benefit from it and sections will show a more accurate representation of the stair. Naturally you'd work your way toward this, no need to do it in schematic design but later when you are ready to really design the stair it might make sense?

[Edit - added images]
James Savage shared a couple screen captures with me for his approach to these stairs. It is similar to the approach the Jeff used in his video, adjusting where the boundary lines start and stop...moving them forward or back along the stair path. This gets pretty close. For complete control the in-place family will still offer more options. At least James worried about supporting the other side of the stair! Thanks for sharing them with me.

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.