Wooden staircase design and installation in Nairobi

A staircase is the largest single piece of joinery in most houses and the only one people touch every day. It is also the one where the difference between competent and careless shows immediately: a tread that flexes, a handrail that is not at a comfortable height, a nosing that catches a bare foot.

This is the most valuable work we do and the work the forty-three years matters most on.

What a staircase costs

A standard straight or L-shaped flight with a timber handrail typically runs KES 200,000 to 350,000. A statement staircase, meaning a floating flight, an open riser design or a curve, runs KES 600,000 to 1.5 million and above. Balustrades and handrails on their own, for example replacing a metal rail with timber, run about KES 36,000 to 108,000 for a twelve-metre run.

Those are market ranges for Kenya reviewed September 2026, not quotations. A curved flight is the one thing on this page with no published Kenyan rate we could verify, and we will not invent one: it is quoted after measuring, because the geometry drives the cost far more than the timber does.

Straight, L-shaped, curved

Straight is the cheapest and the most efficient in floor area. It is also the least interesting, which matters in a double-height entrance where the stair is the first thing anyone sees.

L-shaped and U-shaped with a landing are the most common in Nairobi maisonettes. The landing is a useful thing in its own right and it shortens the fall if anyone slips.

Curved and helical is a different order of work. Each tread is a different shape, the strings have to be laminated to the curve, and there is no way to prefabricate it from a drawing alone. It is the most expensive timber joinery in a house and, done properly, it is the thing visitors remember.

The balustrade decides how it feels

balustrade measures 480 searches a month in Kenya at the highest advertising cost of any joinery term we track, which tells you people care about this part specifically.

Three things matter. Handrail height and profile, because a rail you cannot wrap a hand around is decoration rather than a handrail. Baluster spacing, which needs to be close enough that a small child cannot get through, and this is the single most common fault we see on otherwise good staircases. And the newel post fixing, because a newel that works loose makes the whole run feel unsafe even when it is structurally fine.

We also fit timber handrails to existing metal balustrades, which is a small job that changes how a house feels out of proportion to its cost.

Timber choice

Treads take the wear, so they want a dense hardwood: mvule or mahogany where the budget allows. Risers and strings can be a lighter timber because they carry load rather than abrasion. Cypress is serviceable for painted work and wrong for a clear finish on a tread, because it dents.

A staircase in a Nairobi house also has to cope with a dry season and a wet one, and timber moves. That is designed for with the joint detail rather than hoped away, which is why a staircase built from properly seasoned stock and assembled with movement in mind stops creaking after the first month instead of getting worse.

Getting it into the house

This is the constraint nobody anticipates. A staircase cannot be carried in as one piece, so it is built as components in the workshop and assembled in position. Where a house has a narrow entrance or a tight turn, and Karen and Kitisuru driveways frequently do, the sectioning is planned deliberately with the joints placed where they will not be in a sightline.

A joint decided in the workshop is invisible. A joint decided on the doorstep is not.

A gap worth knowing about

There is no shortage of metal staircase and railing fabricators in Nairobi, and steel dominates the market for balustrades. Timber staircase work is genuinely thinner on the ground, which is part of why we do it: staircase design carries 880 searches a month at a competition index of 48, which is unusually soft for the most valuable page on this site.