FLOATING

A floating staircase removes everything the eye expects — stringers, posts, visible support — and leaves only the treads, stepping up through open air. The work behind that restraint is considerable. Each tread is anchored to hidden structural steel, engineered in our Toronto studio and forged in-house by the same hands that will install it. We are a small atelier with a deliberately short order book, which lets one team carry a project from the first hand drawing through the 3D model to the finished stair. Nothing is subcontracted. What arrives in your home is solid material over concealed steel, fitted in place over three to seven days, and warranted for a year of our workmanship.

The floating stair is a cantilever problem solved quietly. Each tread carries its load back to concealed structural steel, so the structure that does the work is the structure you never see. That inversion is what makes the type demanding: every fixing, weld, and tolerance must be resolved before a single tread is set, because there is no stringer to hide an adjustment behind. We begin with hand drawings, then build a 3D model of your stair in its actual space, revising it at no charge until you approve. The steel is forged in our own shop, so the geometry on the screen and the geometry on the bench are checked against each other by the same people. Deflection, vibration, and alignment are engineered out before installation, not corrected after.

A floating tread works harder than it appears to, and the materials are chosen accordingly. The walnut is quarter-sawn North American stock — the cut that keeps an unsupported tread stable — with deep chocolate grain that oils well and ages toward amber. White oak, rift-cut, runs pale and linear, equally at home under a light or dark finish. Where the scheme turns modernist, hot-blackened carbon steel forms rails and exposed details: sealed, matte, deep graphite, with the soft variation hand-finishing leaves. And for balustrades that disappear entirely, optically clear low-iron glass, tempered and laminated, sized between 15 and 19 millimetres to suit its span, every panel edge-polished and individually calculated. Solid material throughout; we do not work in veneer, laminate, or composite.

Walnut · White Oak · Blackened Steel · Low-Iron Glass

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Floating stairs tend to be commissioned by people renovating toward openness — owners of Toronto Victorians opening up narrow plans, and builders of new homes in Oakville, Vaughan, and Markham who want the stair to belong to the room rather than divide it. Because there is no stringer or riser to block the eye, light passes through the flight and sightlines run the full depth of the house; a hallway becomes a room. Solid treads on steel are quiet underfoot, without the hollow note of lighter construction. Buyers notice a stair like this the moment they walk in, which is why it earns its keep at resale. Most commissions run six to ten weeks from first consultation to the finished stair.