Award: Pacific Northwest Design

This elegant staircase has won three prestigious design awards since its installation in 2014 .

The project started with the client and designers vision of an elegantly simple stair for a West Seattle beach front home. The conversation and development ultimately turned to a Spiral Stair with a complementary Juliet balcony. Spiral Stairs offer their own unique challenges for the fabricator and designer. This spectacular Spiral stair offered an array of challenges (and rewards) for everyone involved.

This Spiral Stair was set into a square well creating a wonderful opportunity for the designer to play with the line of the curve as it moves across the square walls.

This Spiral Stair was designed with a paneled soffit. A typical round spiral stair inherently shares a typical geometry in the soffit area that is relatively simple to repeat. This stair, especially after the designer highlighted the curves and fluid motion of the underside, inherits an ever changing geometry of arcs and ellipses defying a simple manufacturing process.

This stair also employs a balustrade of tapered square balusters. To greatly emphasize the fluidity of movement as one travels this stair, these balusters are set on the bias – creating lovely diamond patterns on the stringer. The level of complexity this added for the fabricator was deliciously challenging. Each baluster becomes a unique puzzle piece of this deceptively simple looking stair.

In the details - Painting the handrail in a specially chosen gloss black reinforces the special attention that was given to the fluidity of the handrail and its graceful ascension to the private spaces of the home.