Forget the advice from "some guy at the store." Wood conditioners are meant to prevent splotching, but they do a poor job at that. Stains are of two basic types - Pigments : finely ground powders - Dyes : chemicals that are dissolved Think of third grade science where you put dirt in a jar of water and shook it and sugar in a jar of water and shook it. What was the difference the next day? The dirt mostly settled out to the bottom. The sugar remained in solution. Pigments work like the dirt and dye like the sugar. The big contrast comes about because the earlywood (large pores) get a lot of pigment in them and the latewood (hard and smooth), does not absorb so much because it's wiped off. Dyes, on the other hand will absorb more evenly and reduce the contrast (at least color wise). So, what you want is a dye. Problem is, Minwax stains are sometimes dyes, sometimes pigments, and often both. They don't tell you. I suggest looking up Bob Flexner's "Understanding Wood Finishing" at your local library, where he shows photos of oak dyed on one half and pigmented on the other. Then get some scrap of oak and test out your intended products and processes on the scrap before starting on your newel post. It's easier to not make a mistake than it is to recover from one. You can get dyes at most woodworking stores such as Rockler and Woodcraft, or via mail order. You can control the concentration by how much dye you add to solvent (distilled water in most cases). So you might want to mix up a series of concentrations and apply each to see the resulting color. But to see the true color, you will have to apply the finish coats as finishes intensify the stain colors.

We did not used a painted/stained combo, but strictly stained. Disclaimer: We did not stain anything ourselves, but paid a finisher to do it before install. We used 'rustic' cherry stained quite dark for all our interior trim, including our wood handrails. Since the entire 1st floor minus office is 'rustic' Maple, Treads and risers are also Maple, stained the same dark color. Balusters are wrought iron. I would say on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being the darkest stain possible before looking black) our cherry trim is probably a 7. Grain pattern is present but not overwhelming, it tends to be tighter on cherry than oak, hickory, or walnut. Our Cherry is not red-hued whatsoever, because its too dark. We had no issue with staining Maple, even though I have heard some on here mention it is impossible to stain Maple dark because it is such a hardwood. A good finisher will know what to do and should have no issues. I say 'rustic' because we requested wood with knots and such, to add more character and we wanted the cherry to match better with our knotty alder interior doors.

In Postwar houses with the same kind of evil, rough, sanded-plaster walls that we had when I was five, a chair rail may protect chairs' finish or upholstery from getting shredded, but generally, a chair rail's protection is intended to work the other way around: not to protect the chairs, but to keep the paint unmarked & the plaster un-gouged from the chairs being knocked into or dragged along the walls. I'm just sayin'. But chair rails protect the walls from more than chairs. There are also kids, and while plain walls with smooth finishes were all the style thing in 1965, they're also a lot harder to maintain in pristine condition than walls broken up into separate sections with moldings, which moldings allow you to freshen the walls without too much effort. In our family we had four boys & assorted pets, and in no house we ever lived did the place look as dingy & dodgy as our 196Os ranch with its long, narrow corridors of mint green & aqua & pink. Up above, the brand-new walls were immaculate, but from doorknob height on down, it was always a mess. Worse, because there was no convenient cut-off place--as there would have been with a chair rail--you couldn't just touch up the wall where a say, the heel of cowboy boot had gouged the plaster during a corridor ambush of the posse by a gang of bad guys, or where an errant Big Wheel had gone out of control & left a dirty scrape all the way down the hall. Add to those occasional incidents the continual finger-dragging that little kids seem to do by nature, and the the general grimy area that you get when you combine narrow halls & large dogs, and you can see the logic of having a molding a few feet above the floor. But our house was crisp & Modern and it didn't have what were considered superfluous, old-fashioned moldings, so it was either paint the whole wall, end-to-end, floor-to-ceiling, or do nothing & just leave the marks & smears & chipped plaster. My mother, being an early proponent of Energy Conservation, chose the latter, with the result that that place always looked like hell. When we moved into a big old Craftsman Style house, with a dark oak dado that stood chest high in the hall & the corridors, my mom no longer had to worry about telltale dirt & scuff marks on the walls. Not, of course, that she ever did. Anyway, stylistically speaking, chair rails may be out of place in a Modern house, but for simple practicality, they're hard to beat.

Painting will not look right and it will not hold up. There are firms that will come in and spray (refinish) your treads and bannister because that is what I did. Then you can paint the spindles. My staircase was similar all one color from 1970s.