Left photo by Alex Haw, top right photo by Phil Watson, bottom right photo by Duncan Smith
London-based art, architecture, and design practice Atmos, have recently completed a sculptural wood spiral staircase that’s the centerpiece for the 3-storey HIDE restaurant in London.
Photography by Alex Haw
The centrepiece staircase, created by Polish design and manufacturing company Trabczynski / GD Staircases, is shaped in a plant-like structure that travels from the basement, all the way up through the restaurant, towards the daylight above.
Photography by Duncan Smith
The entire surface is made of European Oak, while the main structure is created from glued slices of thin oak veneer, laid and laminated together against curved moulds and then hand-sanded into shape to form an elaborately-curving timber structure whose visible grain follows its path.
Photography by Alex Haw
Thicker slabs of oak floorboards form the upper and lower surface of each tread, thus echoing the fields of parallel oak floorboards at the uppermost treads of each flight.
Photography by Joel Knight
The spiral staircase is a 16 feet (5m) in diameter, with a 3 foot (1m) wide void free of structure. No two lines repeat, no treads are the same and each step contributes its unique part to an ever-evolving algorithmic sequence.
Top photo by Phil Watson, bottom photo by Duncan Smith
Each stair tread lightens slightly in tone to perfectly match and align with the 3 main tonal values of each floor it joins, from dark in the basement to light on the top floor.
Top and bottom left photos by Duncan Smith, bottom right photo by Alex Haw
It took a team of people 10,000 hours to fabricate the stairs, which was built as a single prefabricated element, split into 2 lifts because of the limitations of their warehouse’s roof height.
Top photo by Joel Knight, bottom photo by Alex Haw
It took 8 journeys to ship it by land across Europe to the restaurant, where 6 men worked day and night to splice and connect its components, mask and sand the junctions between elements, and stain and finish the entire piece.
