Staircases within event venues have enormous potential for event producers: Naturally eye-catching architectural features, they can serve as prominent places to communicate marketing messages or to grab guests' attention with on-theme decor. Incorporating staircases into event design and branding can also serve as a clear way to direct attendees to various areas of a party space. From stunning decor to logos and branding, here's how producers and designers have decorated staircases to serve as high-function event elements.
Cole Haan took to New York in 2012 to introduce its Chelsea Pump, marketed as a shoe that can be worn late into the night. As part of the brand’s “Don’t Go Home” campaign, it hosted dance parties at a venue where the stairs bore messages announcing reasons to stay out late.
Photo: David X Prutting/BFAnyc.com
At Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs event in 2014, organizers eschewed a traditional red carpet in favor of stairs leading to the event space emblazoned with a custom typography message bearing the name of the occasion.
Photo: Carolyn Curtis for BizBash
In 2013, New York’s famous Costume Institute gala had a punk-inspired theme. Nodding to the genre’s British and American origins, designers dressed the museum’s staircase with American and British flags made entirely of 150,000 red, white, and blue roses.
Photo: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art/BFAnyc.com
At the Corcoran Gallery of Art gala in Washington in 2012, a baroque-style gobo decked out the museum’s grand staircase, which is lined with marble statues and busts.
Photo: Tony Brown/imijphoto.com
In its first year in Canada, 2014, the TED conference decked Vancouver Convention Center's stairs with color-blocked sections printed with the conference's tagline, "The next chapter starts here.”
Photo: Bret Hartman
Saveur hosted its Summer BBQ in New York in 2014. To get attendees excited about what would greet them within the outdoor culinary event, the words "cocktails," "sweets," "photo booth," "music” and others decorated a staircase.
Photo: Beth Kormanik/BizBash
Each year, E3 takes over multiple halls in the Los Angeles Convention Center, as well as its lobby areas and on the plazas outside. The show and its vendors take over stairs for marketing and branding, as in this example from 2013, which used both the stairs and surrounding columns.
Photo: Alesandra Dubin/BizBash
Event designer David Beahm used votive candles in a snaking pattern down the the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s stairs for a private corporate event.
Photo: Courtesy of David Beahm
In a more straightforward take on the look, a display of 1,200 votive candles lined the stairs in the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the opening-night party for Bullets Over Broadway in New York in 2014, greeting the 900 guests as they arrived from the St. James Theatre.
Photo: Carolyn Curtis for BizBash
Sabra Dipping Company set up a pop-up dining experience called Hummus House in Washington in 2014. Within the space, stairs leading to the second floor were decorated with pots containing dried vegetables meant to represent various flavors of the brand’s hummus.
Photo: Glossy Creative
Moët & Chandon was the official champagne partner for Sex and the City 2, and as such, the brand worked with Warner Brothers to host an advance screening of the sequel at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago in 2010. The brand decorated the stairs at the venue with branded stars reminiscent of the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame.
Photo: Bob Carl
Engadget hosted a meet-up for its readers in New York in 2011. Not missing an opportunity to brand the venue for 1,400 guests walking the stairs, the AOL-owned tech blog used them as surfaces on which to plaster its logo.
Photo: Jika González for BizBash
