'Climbing is to ascend not only through space, but through centuries of lineage': The great staircases of Britain's finest country houses

When the author Emma Craigie was a child, her father bought Ston Easton Park in Somerset. This was in 1964, a time when many great houses were under threat of demolition, but some, including Ston Easton, had been saved by preservation orders. In this case, it was the house’s staircase that had been singled out as a feature of special importance. As are many grand country-house staircases, it was designed to impress: a sweeping ascent from the reception hall to the principal rooms, a visible symbol of status and hospitality. For Ms Craigie’s younger brother, Thomas, however, it was simply the perfect place to hide things.

‘The original 18th-century wooden staircase had a copper pipe above the balustrade, covered in red velvet as a handrail,’ she recalls. ‘My brother used to sneak chocolates from a cupboard and then stuff the wrappers in the hollow copper tube.’ It wasn’t until the house was sold in 1978 that his secret was uncovered. ‘The sweet wrappers went all the way up inside the staircase,’ she laughs. ‘It’s now part of a family legend.’

The fact that Ston Easton’s staircase was specifically protected shows how central such structures are to the architectural identity and backbone of a country house. ‘The staircase has been one of the essential places of architectural expression in the English country house since the 16th century,’ says architectural historian Jeremy Musson.

They also provide arteries of human intrigue and drama, whether for shedding sweet wrappers, passing secret messages — as at Harewood House in West Yorkshire, where servants carried illicit notes between household staff and guests up the cantilever stairs — or playing host to ghostly apparitions, such as the famous ‘Brown Lady’ of Raynham Hall, Norfolk, whose spectral image was first published in Country Life almost 90 years ago and remains debated today.

Great staircases embody both the grandeur and the secrets of aristocratic life. They continue to hold audiences rapt, not only in history, but in popular imagination. In a recent Bridgerton trailer, two masked figures cross each other on a Regency staircase, a fleeting touch mid flight turning architecture into pure romantic theatre. These dramatisations of country-house life, including the likes of Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey, endure, says the actress Keeley Hawes, ‘because they’re about history and look so beautiful, too’.

Historically, staircases were at their most spectacular in the Baroque era, with Castle Howard’s in North Yorkshire one of the most theatrical thanks to its architect, Sir John Vanbrugh, who began his career in the theatre. Castle Howard is Mr Musson’s personal favourite: ‘Climbing the steps is like stepping into a scene from an opera, affording dizzying views up and down the domed great hall from different angles.’ Not only did the house feature in Bridgerton, but also in Brideshead Revisited — twice.

Staircases are also signals of social or upward descent. Novelist and ‘bright young thing’ Nancy Mitford knew more than a few in her lifetime. In her book The Sun King, about Louis XIV and his love affairs, she describes a moment when two of his mistresses — the Marquise de Montespan and Madame de Maintenon — met on the stairs. ‘Are you going down, Madame? I am going up,’ Maintenon remarked. ‘The point, however courteously expressed,’ explains theatre critic Alastair Macaulay, ‘was that Montespan’s period of glory was passing, whereas Maintenon was in the ascendant; the staircase was the ideal metaphor.’

This sense of metaphor was particularly recognised at Chatsworth, Mitford’s sister Debo’s marital home as Duchess of Devonshire. In the Duchess’s book The House, she describes ‘the staircase that leads to the Duke and Duchess’s own quarters’ as evoking ‘a granted moment of privileged access into the personal spaces suggested as lying beyond the shadows at the top of the steps’. They hinted at hierarchy, in other words. This was traditionally in full display when royal visitors came to stay. Then, at Chatsworth, the staircase would be lined with ranks of liveried footmen. It was a carefully choreographed display of household order, scrutinised by society eyes trained to read every nuance.

By the late 17th and early 18th century, Mr Musson explains, ‘the staircase apartment was often decorated with lively wall paintings intended to heighten the visitor’s emotions en route to the smarter rooms. Think Kensington Palace and Petworth House, in West Sussex, as prime examples’.

Easton Neston in Northamptonshire, formerly a Hesketh family home, is another classic creation, with its spectacular staircase art.

The house is now owned by the businessman Leon Max, who describes himself as an ‘aesthete’ and was so attuned to the aesthetics of the staircase that he replaced the vast glass chandelier he inherited above it with an exact replica of the original that would have hung there in the Hesketh family era.

At Rhug Hall in Denbighshire, the seat of Lord Newborough, the staircase is less about operatic theatre than about family history. Built in the 18th century, the staircase rises in three anticlockwise flights. As Lord Newborough explains, ‘there are painted panels that tell the story of the Salisbury family. Originally positioned elsewhere in the house, they now line the stair’. Climbing it is to ascend not only through space, but through centuries of lineage.

According to cantilever staircase specialist Helen Rogers, who admits to being ‘a little obsessed with cantilever staircase history’, the staircase at Easton Neston ‘has a very gentle rise, which makes it a pleasure to stroll up and down’. That would have been deeply reassuring for debutantes making their first appearance or a young countess making her first nerve-wracking entrance into Society, often being featured on the Country Life Frontispiece, too.

If the principal staircase was about theatre and impression, the back stairs were about silence, secrecy and labour, the hidden arteries of the house. Architecture itself enforced this social divide. Giacomo Leoni, the Palladian architect, insisted that ‘secondary stairs are for children, servants and less-favoured guests’. That hierarchy of movement was built into every great house: the show staircase for ceremony, the service stairs for the unseen machinery of life.

Gradually, the ground-floor reception rooms gained more importance than staircases. That was unless an architect, such as Sir Edwin Lutyens, chose to flex his design prowess, which he did magnificently at Castle Drogo in Devon. ‘Its great stairway is an imaginatively illustrated storybook,’ declares the architectural critic Jonathan Glancey.

During the Second World War, countless country houses were requisitioned and their great stairs suffered accordingly: at Wilton House in Wiltshire, James Wyatt’s imperial stair was chipped when a safe was rolled down it. Similarly, American soldiers caused the collapse of part of the stair at Marston House in Somerset after attempting to drive a Jeep up it in a lively moment.

Today, country-house staircases continue to appeal for their places of historic drama. Curators at the National Trust admit they could fill ‘an encyclopaedia of staircase drama’ with stories collected from its houses. It’s no wonder that Dr Elizabeth Green, the Trust’s senior curator for architectural history, describes staircases as being not only ‘moments of arrival’, but that they ‘stretch the possibilities of material strength and deliver beauty through design and decoration’.

They also bear cases of human imprint — literally. At Monkton, in West Sussex, the poet and Surrealist patron Edward James was so enamoured of his dancer wife, Tilly Losch, that he had woven into the carpet the imprint of her wet footprints as she emerged from the bath and ascended the spiral stair. After their divorce, James had the carpet moved to nearby West Dean House (now an inspiration for students at West Dean College) and replaced it at Monkton with a similar carpet marked instead with the pawprints of his dog.

Today, the fact that a canine footprint — or a child’s — is more likely than a deb’s instep seems fitting for the evolving life of the country-house staircase.