Seattle Stair: Builds stairways for the stars

Credit: Hayley Young

Shawn Christman, right, in his SoDo workshop with project manager Chad Hamel.

He 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 & Melinda Gates Foundation. It built the steel-and-glass stair structure for the Barneys New York store in Seattle and 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 Oprah Winfrey’s O.W. Ranch, 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.” His website (seattlestair.com) declares: “We understand the sensuous geometry of a compound curve. We know how to create the perfect helical twist in wood or steel.”

Besides aesthetics and mathematics, Christman’s team must deal with the legal constraints and considerations put on the building of structures that lift people and great weights high into the air. It’s that epic, relentless battle with gravity.

Christman started doing millwork for other people while in college. It was the late 1970s, the age of Aquarius was just wrapping up and the young Christman had stair parts dancing in his head. He was frustrated, as young men can be, with the old stair building order.

That order is still in place today. Stairways are typically an afterthought, out of plumb and often fashioned from scrap lumber—rough structures thrown together by contractors for their own use during construction. At the end of the job, they send a finish carpenter to lipstick the pig, making it acceptable to look at and

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