Georgia 
There is a particular feeling you get when a staircase stops being a staircase and starts being a reason to move through a space. At the Schoonderwoerd residence in Bilthoven, Netherlands, that feeling begins the moment you step inside: a sweeping curve of bronze-finished steel rises from broad oiled walnut treads, pendant lights hang like suspended crystals in the void between floors, and the whole assembly quietly insists that you keep going. What was once a closed, uninviting entrance has become the defining gesture of the entire home.
This is the project that EeStairs and designer Pieter Laureys of TK Interiors chose to demonstrate what happens when technical ambition and formal clarity are allowed to operate as a single, unified intention — and the result is worth sitting with slowly.
The Project
The brief for the Schoonderwoerd house in Bilthoven centered on a single spatial problem: the entrance area was closed off and felt like little more than a corridor to somewhere else. Pieter Laureys of TK Interiors, working in close collaboration with Cornelis van Vlastuin at EeStairs, proposed solving it architecturally rather than decoratively. The answer was a two-part staircase conceived as the spatial centerpiece of the ground floor.
The installation pairs five broad steps in oiled walnut with a narrow, asymmetrically positioned spiral staircase fabricated in steel and finished in bronze using EeStairs’ proprietary EePaint treatment. The two components are in deliberate dialogue: orthogonal lines meet a continuous curve, warm wood meets cool steel, and the whole thing is held together by a level of geometric precision that makes something structurally complex feel visually effortless. As Cornelis van Vlastuin put it, the goal was for rigorous planning to produce natural lightness — and standing at the bottom of those walnut steps, it is easy to believe they got there.
SaveThe Spaces
The Entrance Hall: Walnut Meets Bronze
At ground level, the first thing you register is the material conversation happening between the walnut treads and the bronze-finished steel fascia rising beside them. The five broad steps are generously proportioned — wide enough to slow you down, to make the act of ascending feel considered rather than automatic. The grain of the oiled walnut runs horizontally across each tread, catching the warm light that falls from the pendant cluster above. Beside them, the steel spiral begins its upward arc, its surface patinated to a warm, slightly uneven bronze that reads less like a finish and more like something that has been allowed to develop naturally over time.
SaveThe Spiral: A Geometry in Continuous Motion
Looking down through the circular void at the heart of the spiral is one of those moments in architecture that genuinely rewards stopping. From above, the oiled walnut treads of the straight stair are visible through the opening, framed by the dark, curving interior wall of the spiral. A figure crossing the lower landing becomes almost cinematic — motion blur caught inside a precise geometric aperture. The pendant lights, seen from this angle, read as faceted forms rather than sources of warmth, their crystalline geometry echoing the angular precision of the steel structure around them.
SaveThe Upper Landing: Where the Curve Resolves
At the top of the spiral, the bronze fascia widens into a broad curved wall that traces the perimeter of the upper landing. Standing here, you understand the full spatial logic of the design: the curve does not just enclose a staircase, it shapes the room around it. The glass balustrade at the landing edge keeps the volume open, maintaining sightlines back down to the entrance floor below. A dark-stained timber door sits quietly to the right, its vertical grain playing against the horizontal sweep of the bronze steel — a moment of restraint that lets the staircase remain the primary event.
SaveThe Pendant Cluster: Light as Structural Counterpoint
The choice of pendant lighting is doing more work here than it might first appear. A cluster of faceted crystal cube pendants descends from a central ceiling rose, staggered at different heights so they echo the rising movement of the staircase itself. Their warm amber glow reads against the cooler bronze surface of the steel, softening what could otherwise be a very hard material palette. They also provide the vertical counterpoint that the horizontal walnut treads need — a downward gesture to balance all that upward motion.
SaveThe Stairfinder Process: From Concept to Fabrication
Part of what made this degree of precision possible was EeStairs’ Stairfinder — a digital design and specification tool that brings architects into a collaborative process from the earliest conceptual stage. For the Schoonderwoerd project, it meant that the tight radii of the spiral, the complex geometry where the two stair types meet, and the demanding EePaint bronze finish were all integrated into the design conversation from the outset rather than becoming problems to solve during fabrication. The result is a staircase that reads as inevitable — as though it could not have been any other way.
SaveThe EeStairs Portfolio: The Same Logic, Different Vocabularies
The Schoonderwoerd project is one point on a much longer line of work that EeStairs has developed across Europe, the UK, North America, and Asia. The firm’s in-house teams cover engineering, architecture, product design, software development, manufacturing, and installation — which is precisely why a project like this can hold together across so many material and geometric demands. The name EeStairs derives from ‘Exponent of Excellence,’ and across their portfolio, the commitment to full in-house process control — from design brief through final installation — is the constant that makes formal ambition achievable rather than aspirational.
What you might carry home
The Schoonderwoerd project is a residential commission, which means its lessons are closer to Maya’s world than a lot of architecture press coverage tends to be. A few things from this specific project are worth holding onto.
The first is the idea of treating a constraint as an invitation. The entrance hall in Bilthoven was closed and uninviting — the brief was not to disguise that fact but to address it directly with a single architectural move. In a suburban home, a cramped hallway or an awkward level change is often treated as something to minimize. This project suggests the opposite: naming the problem and making it the focal point almost always produces a more honest and more interesting result than trying to paper over it.
The second is the value of a material conversation rather than a material match. Walnut and bronze-finished steel are not the same temperature, the same weight, or the same visual register — and that is exactly why they work together here. The oiled wood is warm, horizontal, and grain-forward; the steel is cool, curved, and surface-forward. They do not compete because they are clearly doing different jobs. When you are choosing materials for a space in your own home, the question worth asking is not ‘do these match’ but ‘do these have something to say to each other.’
The third is about scale and proportion in lighting. The pendant cluster here is not subtle — it is a genuine presence in the vertical space. But it earns that presence by echoing the movement of the staircase rather than competing with it. In a double-height hallway or a stairwell at home, a single ceiling fixture will almost always feel stranded. A clustered or staggered pendant arrangement gives the vertical volume something to hold onto without requiring a complete architectural overhaul.
The fourth is about the payoff of early planning. The precision in this project — the way the spiral meets the straight stair, the way the bronze finish reads as continuous rather than applied — came from integrating technical constraints into the design conversation from day one, not retrofitting them later. For anyone commissioning a staircase replacement or a hallway renovation, the single most useful thing you can do is bring your fabricator or contractor into the design conversation as early as possible, ideally before you have committed to a form.
SaveA Staircase As Architectural Invitation is, in the end, a project about what happens when you stop treating a staircase as infrastructure and start treating it as the first thing a space has to say. In Bilthoven, that conversation begins with five broad walnut steps and a curve of bronze steel, and it does not really end — it just continues upward, which is precisely the point.
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SaveWhen the entrance becomes the gesture
