I saw a copy of an image of these stained stairs and sought out the original to see how they were done. Well, after a nifty little Google image search trick*, I found the people who actually did them. They were designed a few years ago by Melanie Royals and stained by her studio assistant, Melissa. The designs which mimic marquetry work are stencilled, or more accurately “Modello-ed”, then stained by hand – hugely time & labour intensive, but what a result!

As well as stairs, her designs look amazing on walls and on floors too – here are lots more photos of their handiwork.

*_{Go to the Google homepage, click on the ‘Images’ link found on the top toolbar, enter/paste the url of the image file you found on the internet into the search bar. To find the url, right click/control click on the image and select “copy image location”. Finally, click on the camera icon. All the instances of the image that are online will be magically listed!}