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.

We have wrought iron railings in our house and when we gutted it several years ago I too thought that picking new railings would be easy. No. I spent hundreds of hours on the internet looking at thousands of designs. When we moved back into the house I still hadn't found a pattern that I liked and it wasn't until 8 months later that I finally found something which, with a little tweak, made me happy. All that to say I feel your pain. Unfortunately I don't know how to just post a picture but I like the wrap around railing at the bottom on picture number 2 for your house. I have no idea about the rest but do like that. It feels rather welcoming to me. http://www.homestylecentral.com/wrought-iron-stair-railing-ideas/ I will look some more. Talk about a rabbit hole though.

OK, you all have convinced me to eliminate the oak look of the risers. While I'm too conservative to paint them, I'm thrilled with the many options for stick on riser decals that can be readily removed, including one with the pattern I've been nuts about for ages! It's called Astra, here. BUT -- back to the newel post/handrail for the upper section of this stairway.....previous comments were that we don't have the open wall for the spindles and we have no place for a newel post. I need to understand if the change I want to make isn't feasible, when it seems to me like it should be...please helps!