Customizing Stair Nosing and Railing in Revit: A Step-by-Step Guide

Now we can go in and take a look at the nosing of the stair, and you can see right now it's got a bit of a profiled nosing with this vertical leg and then this angle that comes back. And so if we select the stair again, we can go to Edit Type and then we can take a look at our run type, which then has all the parameters that we're looking for in our treads and risers. These settings will allow us to make any adjustments that we want to the treads and the risers.

And so when you look at this, what I like to do is take a look at the two elements individually. The tread is the horizontal piece, and the riser is the vertical piece. And so what we'll do is go in and take a look at some of these settings and change some of the profiles to improve its appearance.

So the tread was the one that I pointed out here. It's set to the nosing profile of the Stair Nosing Pan, Stair Nosing Pan. You know, they like to get creative with the naming, but we can change it to something else.

The default one is fine for me because it just gives us a nice edge to it. I prefer that, honestly. But we can make the riser slanted.

If you were to uncheck this box here, it would actually not have a riser, which we can't really do here, but you could do that if you were doing a residential project. That would give you a riserless look. And then slanted is just going to have it slope back at an angle.

So instead of having this be vertical, it’ll slope back at an angle. The thickness on both of these, the depth and the thickness, are pretty self-explanatory. When you see this depth here, that's what they're referring to as the thickness.

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And so that right there is represented by this tread thickness of two inches. And then this is the distance from the riser—which is this plane right here—to the face of the nosing, and is what you're seeing here as the one-inch nosing. The quarter-inch riser thickness you can see is that thin line right there.

And those can all be customized to suit your project’s needs. So there's a lot of different options that you can choose to make a setup that works for your design. So you can't use the excuse that Revit wouldn't let you do that if you wanted to do a cool-looking stair design because there are literally infinite possibilities for how you can combine these things to create a cool-looking stair.

One of the settings that we did not look at previously was the material. If we go back in here, you can see that we have two categories for materials. And so if I wanted to change the tread material, I can do that.

And I'm going to try to find a wood material, so we'll go with—I believe we have an oak flooring in here that we could use. And then for the risers, we're going to go with a steel. I’ll select this one, as it’s likely not used elsewhere, and that will give us the ability to change the color and make it essentially look like whatever we want it to.

So those two are set. The other one that we have here that we didn't really talk about, though, is this “Extend Riser Behind Tread.” And what that will do is it simply drops the riser down to this point.

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If I were to change this setting, the tread could go all the way back behind the riser. That one has very little impact on the model, so we don't really worry about it too much. Okay, and you can see it looks totally different now.

And so for our stringers here, we can set that material as well. So this HSS stringer type that we created—we can set that material type to the same steel. And you'll see the benefit of using the same material for these because we can actually set their appearance when we get to that point to a specific color.

Then we don’t have to worry about setting many different material types. So I'm going to hit OK all the way out. And now we've created the custom stair piece.

Our next step is going to be to create the custom railing.