Stairs & Trim in Upper Arlington, OH

Upper Arlington was a property development before it was a town. King and Ben Thompson bought 840 acres in 1913 and called it the Country Club District, modeling it on a scheme in Kansas City and laying it out to a Garden City plan by the landscape architect William Pitkin Jr. — spacious lots with generous setbacks and large front and corner lawns. It incorporated as a village on 20 March 1918 with 200 residents and became a city on 8 February 1941. The southern historic section was listed on the National Register in 1985.

That origin produced houses built with real material quality, and it sets the bar for what goes into them. In the older sections the original detail — trim, staircases, the proportions of the rooms — is the reason people bought the house, and a floor either works with that or looks like a compromise. Plank width, species and sheen carry more weight here than in almost any other town we cover.

Structurally they are pre-war and inter-war houses and behave that way. Plank subfloors, joists that have settled over a century, decks that are not flat within modern tolerance, and original hardwood under carpet regularly. A rigid-core product bridges the dips rather than following them and eventually reads hollow, so the honest options are to level the deck properly or to specify something that tolerates the variation. We will tell you which we would do and why.

Staircases in Old Arlington are frequently open-sided with returns, which means mitered ends worked on site rather than anything pre-made. That is slow work and it is the difference between a staircase that looks built and one that looks covered. We measure every tread rather than estimating.

The city grew again through mid-century, peaking near 39,000 in 1970, so there is a substantial band of post-war housing too, with the standard suburban issues — plywood decks unchecked since construction and layers of previous flooring that have raised the finished height.

Upper Arlington is a shop-at-home market for us — samples in your rooms, measurements taken on the visit, one written proposal for the project. The in-home appointment is complimentary.