BEAUTIFUL TAHOE

BEAUTIFUL TAHOE

I have a lot of connections to Lake Tahoe.
• Framing houses there—Summer of ‘74
• Skiing with my dad—Winter of ‘76 (Squaw Valley, Heavenly Valley, Kirkwood)
• Honeymoon with Marilyn—Summer of ‘79 (still married)
• Last place I saw my dad—Late 90’s
• Buried my dad—1999

So it was with some emotion that I returned there for the first time in many years. I flew into Tahoe Valley Airport with my flight instructor on a beautiful fall day in early October. I was there to share our great story about custom stairs with area architects.

As we flew out the next morning and passed over the town of Truckee, CA it reminded me of rafting the Truckee River with my buddies at the unenlightened age of 20. Unenlightened indeed….and untrained, unguided, unhelmeted and unsafe. Only two guys overboard and we all lived to tell the story. It’s amazing we didn’t get swept out to the Pacific Ocean in the heavy spring runoff.

I will always look back fondly on the summer I spent there framing custom homes. It was a foundational building block for what I do now in custom stair design. Check out the aerial photo…….the houses I built were all in Tahoe Keys, visible on the left side of the image. Thank you Ron Triano, wherever you are.

My peak experience this trip? Dinner at Nephele’s on Ski Run Boulevard. www.nepheles.com/   I WILL be going back there again!  As soon as I land my first stair project in Tahoe.

Shawn F. Christman
President
Seattle Stair and Design

Finding Meaning in a Dusty Shop

Summer has waned and now crisp autumn mornings accompany my awakening self to work. Each year this transition invariably draws me into reflection upon my current blessings. Presently, I find myself part of a passionate group of creative collaborators, encouraged to seek the epitome of quality, and supported in my endeavors by kind, intelligent mentors. It is an honor to be daily met by persons of integrity and witness their attention to craft, perseverance, and infectious joie de vivre. In this stair shop we are playing out an old story, part of a pre-historic movement, seeking beauty through manual creation and thereby providing the tangible reality so sought after by our imaginative brothers and sisters. Placing our weight behind the plane or guiding the chisel through tough end grain with practiced precision brings each of us closer to life. How fortunate we are to suffer these dusty days of triumph.

Michael Lane -Craftsman

Jewelry for the Home

Jewelry Designer Turned Railing Designer


I am thrilled with this new stair project on Lake Sammamish. Coming from a jewelry design background, the process of designing a railing is turning out to be similar to that of designing a ring or other special piece of jewelry. The goal is to come up with a concept that adds to and enhances (as jewelry enhances the wearer) making a statement that is an expression of the home owner, accentuates the beauty that is already there, and is pleasant to look at. When I was designing jewelry I listened to what my client wanted while taking cues from her taste, her lifestyle, and what brought her happiness. For the rail design, I follow the same protocol as well as looking at her furniture taste for inspiration and listening to her desire to accent the lake that is just outside the windows behind the stair. I am incorporating ‘petals’ of glass within the design elements that are the color of the lake, and highlight certain aspects of the overall design. They are like the jewels of the rail design, similar to diamonds or sapphires in a piece of jewelry.
Phoebe Schraer
Executive Coordinator

Lighthouses: Compressing Spiral Stairs

I've always been fascinated by lighthouses, have gone out of my way in my airplane to overfly one at too low an altitude and have toured several in my travels. When PBS has a lighthouse special, I always watch it. Obviously part of the fascination comes from the amazing circular stairs inside. They are intriguing from the standpoint that many of them are a compressing spiral, meaning since the tower is often tapered, they get tighter as the spiral climbs toward the lens. I have photographed this architectural feature somewhat extensively because I found it challenging from a design standpoint. I have plans and drawings for such a stair. One "bucket list" ambition I have is to build a climbing/tapering/lighthouse style staircase for someone's home or office before I'm too old to master its complexity. –Shawn Christman, Seattle Stair

If you haven't visited the Heceta Head lighthouse in Oregon, I highly recommend it. Google this lighthouse, purported to be the most-photographed one in the US, and you'll find some gorgeous professional photography of the interior stairs.

photo from Planet Eugene.com

Seattle Stair & Design Featured in Seattle Business Article

"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.

Touring with Journalists with an Eye on Design: Seattle Stair & Design's Stairway Studio Showcases Skill and Artistry

Recent visits by design media remind us of what makes our workspace so special. After measuring off site, it’s here that we design and construct our staircases. In our workshop showroom you hear the rattle of a hand-held chisel as a craftsman works a beam of Santos Mahogany. A wisp of dust rises from the rail, carrying the scent of cinnamon on the air. You follow a flash of light around the corner and enter a vast, sun-lit space. The flicker of precision welding equipment illuminates something tall, with elegant lines and sweeping curves, rising toward the rafters. You approach, your hand reaching for the smooth, polished bannister.

Beach Stairs: Seabrook Does it Right

This time of year many of us head to the beach. In Washington, that's often a tricky trip traveled down a high bank rather than on a sloping path to the sand. The Seabrook neighborhood did a great set of stairs to their community's beach. It's mammoth in size and just right in scale to those big beach dunes.