French Landings: An Evolution in Building Elegant Stairs

French landing designs improve L-shaped stair handrails by addressing the problematic pointed landing corner that forces risers to stack vertically. The evolution in stair design creates more elegant and functional handrail configurations for quarter-turn stairs.

In the July/August 2026 issue, I discussed how to improve the shape of the handrail on a basic quarter-turn, or L-shaped, stair. At issue is the landing, which comes to a point at the inside corner and forces two risers to be stacked on top of each other. This configuration causes the handrail to…

This story was originally published by JLC Online.