Problems? We love them!

If you’ve become really expert at something, you might take your skills for granted. EeStairs have made and installed hundreds of feature stairs designed by leading architects in Europe, the UK and North America. These stairs are often geometrically complex, or massive, or very intricately detailed.

But this is normal for us. No point in being modest – we know what we’re doing. We understand stair design and engineering in great detail. We know how to collaborate with clients and contractors. We know how to get things done.

Which is why we LOVE it when we’re taken out of our comfort zone – when we have a project that asks us this question: How good are you?

And this is exactly what happened when we made and installed two connected helical raw steel staircases in the Aurore tower at the La Défense business district in Paris.

Two problems. The building’s original tower crane had been removed. Which meant we couldn’t drop the complete staircase structures into the ground and first floor reception area. And the site was very tight. The solution? We made the stairs in several parts, hoisted them into the space with a long-armed truck crane, and then positioned them using spider-lifts.

But that wasn’t the hardest part. That came earlier.

Our engineers had noticed that the floor slabs were not correctly configured to receive the top steps of the staircases. But they knew how to solve this. They offered a redesign of the floor edges, with an angle, so the stairs could be connected to the floors accurately and securely. And another thing: we also realised that the stairs would have to be slightly rotated to meet the redesigned floor edges.

The strange thing is, if you look at the completed stairs you would never think that this was anything other than a fairly straightforward stair project.

Which is very satisfying for us. Problem? What problem?

Aurore, Courbevoie [FR]
EeStairs + Jean-Paul Viguier & Associés + sisto studios
Photography by Hans Morren