Staircases Like Loretto’s: What Actually Compares
Most lists of “staircases like Loretto’s” quietly cheat. They line up the Vatican’s double helix and Chambord’s open-well stair next to Loretto and call them cousins — but those two famous spirals have central support, and Loretto’s entire claim is that it doesn’t.
The comparison only means something once you separate the genuinely self-supporting from the merely spiral.
The double-helix monuments (supported, and proud of it)
The two spirals everyone reaches for are double helixes — two intertwined flights so people going up never meet people coming down.
The original Bramante Staircase in the Vatican, built in 1505 to Donato Bramante’s design, runs on 36 granite columns along its inner edge; the photogenic one tourists queue for is a 1932 homage by Giuseppe Momo.
The Château de Chambord stair, associated with Leonardo da Vinci’s ideas, wraps two flights around an open central well. Both are masterpieces — of the double-helix trick, not of standing without support. Their structure is right there in columns and a central core.
The genuinely self-supporting kind
The honest comparison for Loretto is the family of cantilevered or geometric stairs, where each step is anchored at one end and the structure carries itself without a central column.
The classic example is the Tulip Stairs at the Queen’s House in Greenwich, designed by Inigo Jones around the 1630s and often called Britain’s first self-supporting (centrally unsupported) spiral staircase.
These stairs do what Loretto does — stand without a pole down the middle — but they do it in stone, each tread cantilevered into a surrounding wall and leaning on the step below.
Two closer cousins turn up in the record itself. The Old Washoe Club in Virginia City, Nevada — from the same 1870s decade — has a spiral stair that Ripley’s Believe It or Not! once billed as “the longest of its kind without a supporting pole,” though it makes fewer turns than Loretto’s. And a stair in the Gdañsk Town Hall in Poland, centuries older, was reported to the Santa Fe New Mexican in 1944 as “strikingly like St. Joseph’s in design” — tall, spiral, and built without steel nails. Neither is a free wooden helix in quite the way Loretto is, but both belong on the honest list where Bramante and Chambord do not.
So what actually makes Loretto distinct?
Set side by side, Loretto’s combination is the rare part.
It is wood, not stone; it is a free-standing helix rather than treads cantilevered into a wall; and it carries its load through two spiral stringers into just the floor and the loft, with the inner stringer wound tight enough to act almost like a hidden pole (the structure is on our how it works page).
A cantilevered stone stair borrows a wall; the monumental double helixes use columns or a core; Loretto leans on neither. That, not the spiral shape, is what’s unusual.
| Staircase | Type | How it’s held up |
|---|---|---|
| Bramante, Vatican (1505) | Double helix, stone | 36 granite columns along the inner edge |
| Château de Chambord | Double helix, stone | Two flights around a central open core |
| Tulip Stairs, Greenwich (c.1630s) | Self-supporting spiral, stone | Cantilevered into the surrounding wall; treads lean on each other |
| Old Washoe Club, Nevada (1870s) | Self-supporting spiral, wood | No central supporting pole (fewer turns than Loretto) |
| Gdañsk Town Hall, Poland | Spiral, wood, older | Reported built without steel nails; “strikingly like St. Joseph’s” |
| Loretto, Santa Fe | Self-supporting helix, wood | Two helical stringers into floor and loft; no central pole, no wall |
The takeaway
“Staircases like Loretto’s” is two different lists pretending to be one. If you mean spiral and beautiful, the Vatican and Chambord lead it.
If you mean standing without a central support — the thing that actually made Loretto famous — the company is smaller, mostly cantilevered stone, and Loretto’s wooden free helix sits a little apart even there.
Keep exploring
- How the staircase stands with no central pole
- Debunked or miracle? Every claim vs the evidence
- The French carpentry method behind the helix
- Back to the Loretto Chapel staircase overview
Researched & fact-checked by the Loretto Volunteers Editorial Team
Loretto Volunteers is an independent research project documenting the history, architecture, and enduring mystery of the Loretto Chapel staircase. We work from primary and archival sources and show our evidence. Last reviewed: June 2026.