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Wilmette Sanctuary Home – Floating Stairs 150 150 Administrator

Wilmette Sanctuary Home – Floating Stairs

Floating stairs with a concealed metal stringer were custom engineered by our Master Carpenter Mike Olson to provide light to the lower level as well as a breathtaking moment in this modern sanctuary home. Take a tour with Amy Berka, SSDB Lead Architect. See the project description and stunning library of photos.

Enjoy the whole video series of this modern new construction home in Wilmette!

Video transcript:

So, these stairs, holy smokes. We knew that we wanted to have something special. We wanted to have this space feel open and not constrained by a staircase.

We also wanted to make sure that all of this daylight from these six windows above could filter down into that space. So it was super important for us to make sure that we had open visor. The tricky part was like, well, how do you build a stair against a wall and not have a support underneath it? You need a stringer, you need a wall, you need something.

And we were really not interested in that. I was particularly not interested in that. What you don’t see is that this wall right here is the foundation wall and onto it is a giant metal stringer that is concealed behind our wood framing and it’s concealed behind our drywall.

Onto that metal structure, which is bolted to the foundation, every single tread that you see has a metal substructure that cantilevers out from that bracket all the way to the edge. And our Master Carpenter, Mike Olson, who is a magician, made these treads. These treads are hollow.

You’d walk on them, you would never know. But he did such an excellent job of mitering the tops and the bottoms and the sides. And then what I think is the perfect detail that gets missed, we have actual end grain. So, what makes this so believable in your mind that this is a solid piece of wood just hanging off that wall is because we paid attention to details like that.