This appreciation of Amsterdam houses appeared in 1767 in the journal De Philosooph (The Philosopher) in an anonymous, polemic article that describes the general docility in matters of style and the lack of taste in the Netherlands, demonstrated in a critical evaluation of Amsterdam architecture. The author was not much later identified as the internationally renowned doctor Petrus Camper, professor in medicine, anatomist, natural scientist, amateur draughtsman, prolific publicist, and probably the first Dutch architecture critic. Camper, who was more of a virtuoso than an amateur, sketches a development in Amsterdam domestic architecture that is surprisingly accurate in his observation, not only of a strong preference for a French manner in domestic architecture, but especially of the rise of the monumental staircase, or stair hall with open-well stairs that replaced the small wooden newel(-post), or spiral, stair residing in the corner of the front room of the typical seventeenth-century Dutch house. From an indispensable but inconspicuous device, stairs were transformed into a monumental, designed centrepiece of the eighteenth-century house. The increasing presence of the staircase in the homes of the Dutch elite has been noted in scholarship, without however connecting it to the dynamics of fashionable culture of the time that demonstrates a special interest in motion.