"A fierce devotion to modern craftsmanship and classical technique keeps one Seattle company several steps ahead," reports the magazine Seattle Business. "Shawn Christman... is settled on a comfortable couch in a SoDo storefront office that’s cluttered with scale models of magnificent winding stairways and tchotchkes of exotic woods, finely finished. But for the coffee table books in French lying around, this might be Geppetto’s man cave.
He is Shawn Christman, 57, who founded and presides over Seattle Stair & Design, which is thriving in a marketplace being commodified with off-the-rack stair kits manufactured by automated offshore factories.
His list of clients is impressive—and those are just the ones he can talk about. Seattle Stair’s recent jobs include 2,000 feet of curved wooden handrail and 1,000 feet of curved paneling for the massive stairs at Seattle’s new headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It built the steel-and-glass stair structure for the Barneys New York store in Seattle and the (curved mahogany handrails for the)Y-shaped staircase at the Bellevue Hyatt. It manufactured an array of 50 Victorian, hand-turned Western red cedar columns and other architectural parts for the Grand Floridian Resort at Walt Disney World. And while Christman is mum about it (wrapped as it is in non-disclosure agreements), the company is working on (the) O.W. Ranch, and a luxury vacation-rental destination in Kula, Maui.
In addition to these large projects, Seattle Stair has built hundreds of residential stairways in the Pacific Northwest, as well as in Japan, Alaska and Hawaii, particularly on Maui.
Christman calls his designs “a balanced mix of geometry, architecture and sculpture.”
Click on blog title above to read the entire story in Seattle Business magazine. Thank you for the wonderful story Leslie Helm and Michael Hood.
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