This project is located in a mountainous town in Colorado, where the client wanted a refined but rustic staircase.  In our area, the latest buzzword for this is Mountain Contemporary.  A multi-million dollar home built in a sleek, contemporary style, but with a little bit of nature and rustic charm brought in as an accent material.  

This project also checks the sustainability box for the client, as the beams were repurposed from another local project.  Speas, the interior design firm heading up this project, had another project up the road where they had torn down a pergola constructed using these doug fir timbers.  This pergola was massive, like no other pergola I had seen before.  

We salvaged and brought the beams back to my shop to be cleaned up and fabricated into the staircase.  The main beams of the pergola, 6"x14" beams, became the stair stringers, and the cross beams, 4"x12", became the stair treads.

For the design and fabrication of the staircase. On the show side of the stringer, I cut pockets and through mortises to accept the tusk tenons from the treads. Each tenon is held in place with a wedge.  For the stringer on the wall side, each tread is let into the stringer and fastened mechanically from the wall side, hiding the fasteners.

The whole staircase was built in three pre-assembled sections in my woodshop, and then we carried each section into the house and installed it.  To meet the engineer and code requirements, any required mechanical fasteners were inlayed and capped into the beams or strategically placed so subsequent finishes would conceal them.  Any large cracks were stabilized with epoxy.