Stairs can be considered integral to furnishing but we don’t have to forget security
A concrete staircase, placed in the middle of an empty building, can have a very brutal appearance. The same can be said of wooden and iron staircases, even when they are designed to be as harmonised with environment as possible. Even on these occasions, a touch is enough to solve everything. In a word, we should treat our staircases as we treat our living rooms: we should furnish them.
Preventing wear and tear on stairs
Staircases are frequently exposed to wear and tear from the weather and trampling but due to high costs they are rarely renewed. More often than not, the safety of the staircase itself suffers.
How many times have we found buildings with rickety or damp, worn or cracked, slippery or smooth stairs? On these occasions it may seem expensive to even think about restoring, but there are a few small steps that can be taken to prevent wear and tear.
Furnishing a staircase
Of course, safety is the most important aspect of a staircase. As the saying goes “Appearance matters too”, because the stair is now also a piece of furniture. Just as every house wants its own front door, every home or office furnishing wants its own staircase. There is no denying that, when renovating a room, the choice of the interior stairs should primarily respond to aesthetic criteria. The choice of material for the steps themselves, whether wood, metal or glass, should also follow aesthetic criteria.
The stair adhesive trick
Even a staircase chosen with this criterion in mind, however, may not be appropriate or distinctive. For this reason, many people now choose to personalize it by applying decorative adhesives to the treads. These adhesives can also be very sophisticated and customised, as we can see in private homes, offices and shops. Adhesives can give the staircase a tiled effect, with more modular or more colourful decorations.
There are also adhesives with more artistic decorations, suggesting the motto or main feature of the place.
Other staircase adhesives can be simply beautiful. We said “Appearance matters too”: and both at home and in the office, we need first and foremost to live in a comfortable and relaxing environment.
Ensuring safety on the stairs
Especially if a staircase is used frequently, such as in offices or shops, but also in lofts or two-storey houses, we must keep one thing in mind: safety. Stairs wear out, absorb moisture, fall apart and become slippery. This applies to all types of stairs, both indoor and outdoor, wooden and concrete.
Exterior concrete stairs, under rain and trampling, will eventually fall apart more and more. The metal steps of a spiral staircase, on the other hand, can become increasingly smooth, collecting and stagnating moisture. Slipping on them can be very dangerous. Wooden stairs only need wear and tear to be ruined: in the long run, they will wrap with treading, creating those characteristic indentation-shaped depressions that we see in older staircases. In these cases, the first solution to ensure the best safety could be to use a special material, such as stone but it is expensive and not appropriate for all spaces.
How to use stair nosing profiles
A useful solution remains the stair noising profile. It can be applied to any type of staircase, from external concrete stairs to interior metal and wooden ones. Stair nosing profiles are cheap and easy to lay. Designed primarily to increase the resistance of the steps, counteracting the wear and tear of treading, stair nosing profiles also provide the necessary friction to avoid slipping in a wet area or on a surface that is too smooth.
In addition, they are made of material which offers a great variety of colors and aesthetic shapes. A dark stair noising profile can blend in perfectly on an interior staircase, while a garish one could give exterior concrete staircases a shrewd touch to tone down the brutality.
Easy to install and wash, Trafil stair nosing profiles are waterproof, disinfected and fire-rated, perfect for places with high hygiene standards, such as schools or hospitals. They do not release chemicals under normal conditions of use and they are unaffected by the use of conventional detergents and degreasers.
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