What is this feature of a staircase called?

What's the name of the slope in the ceiling above a staircase that maintains head-height, and the corresponding slope in the room above?

TIA.

Bad design. ;-)

We looked at a house once with a bedroom upstairs with an awkward sloping bit of floor/wall. Never seen it since and would avoid.

Sorry I can?t help you with its real name.

Tim

On one of the lesser TV channels they often run back to back a whole series of programs called New Home DIY where the presenter (Dave Wellman) goes around fixing or just doing some DIY jobs. It is repeated every 3/6 months.

In one episode he shows how to make best use of that slope in the room above. In this particular episode the slope had been boxed in. He removed the box, constructed a vertical stud wall about half way up the slope and installed a sink with the front of the sink sticking out from the wall in line where the slope met the floor. The space behind the stud wall was used to gain access to the plumbing and for storage.

Stair terms:

Nosing - the leading edge of each tread

Tread - the flat stair surface you stand on

Riser - the vertical element at the back of the treads

Rise - the height difference measured from the top surface of one tread to the top surface of the next one.

Going - the horizontal distance from the nosing of one tread to that of the adjacent step.

The slope of the stair itself is known as the Pitch. The height above the pitch line is the Headroom. Think of the pitch line as being the line that makes contact with the nosings of each tread.

In the uk building regs (approved document K), the minimum headroom is normally 2m, although there is some relaxation for situations like loft conversions where you can have as little as 1.8m at the edhes of the stairs so long as you have 1.9m above the centreline of the staircase.

It doesn't answer the question!

None of which has anything to do with the question the OP asked! :-)

It did - headroom - measured from the pitch line.

The latter is a stair bulkhead

I used to live somewhere like that. It was designed such that that part was the floor to the built in wardrobe. The sloping wardrobe floor was a bit useless, but the space above was fine for hanging. There was an additional built in cupboard on top of the wardrobe.

This was a 1940s council house where every house on the estate had this feature (and every bedroom had a walk in wardrobe). It was good use of the space. Everything else was well designed too, although construction materials were somewhat lacking.

Theo

It's about 1.5m on my stairs. I habitually go up on all fours.

OTOH it's a little older than the regs.

None of the doorways are more than 6ft. I am, and _almost_ always remember to duck...

Andy

Interesting thanks, so not only do I have a coomed ceiling I also have a stair bulkhead in the room.

What do you want, subtitles? :-)

There is no formal name for the slope of the ceiling[1] above a staircase that I am aware of. There *is* a name for the slope of the stairs themselves, and also for the available height above them. If that height remains constant, then that slope is the same as the pitch line of the stairs.

I tend to see the term bulkhead more often used to indicated the blocked out section at the top of a downstairs room, adjacent to the hall with a staircase, where the upper few steps (often the kite and winders) can intrude into the corner of the room.

e.g. in many small semis where the stairs run up from near the front door toward the centre of the house, and they clip a little bit of the downstairs room behind the hall (usually the kitchen).

(possibly just because having an intrusion into the lower part of an upstairs rooms seems less common)

Not enough room for a staircase probably. I've seen this but thankfully my house is deep enough for a staircase!

Brian

In this house the slop or rather a rounded ceiling is at the eaves o of the upstairs ceilings. Before insulation we used to get icicles hanging from it when it was cold outside as there was so little gap between the curve and the roof tiles. Brian

Mine's boxed in in the bathroom. It's acually useful as there's nowhere on the walls for a cupboard. Well there would be room, above the box but that's used for a towel rail. The batroom is rather small.

In the program I mentioned it was a small bathroom with a boxed in slope bit. His removal of the large box and fitting the sink above part of the slope allowed a toilet to be fitted making much better use of the available space. The floor area under a sink is unused so can slope.

I cannot remember all the details but he did go next door to see what modifications they had made to their property and I think the slope was modified by reducing some of the head height for a short length in the stairwell. The boxed in bit in the room did seem to be excessive for what was under it.

My house has 9 foot ceilings and the builders got round the problem in my house by fitting the last 3 steps at 90 degrees to the rest of the stairs. There are two transitional triangular steps to get around the change of direction.

camsile