I love the steel stair. The architects designed it conceptually. I worked out a bunch of structural details. The detailer at the steel company created the detailed design. We iterated three or four times to get it right. This stair cost about $3000 for the steel. Waaay less than having some fancy pants stair company do the design and installation. We’re going to use big, chunky treads (3-1/2″ x 11-1/2″), probably out of reclaimed douglas fir (although they were dimensioned such that pieces of a glulam beam turned on their sides would also work).

The railing still needs to be welded in place…but I love it, even in its rough state.

One detail I really like is that we set the steel side stringers on 3/4″ spacers so that we can slip the drywall behind them. The stringers will serve as the baseboard and we’ll get a nice clean interface to the drywall.

Here are the railing pieces after delivery several months later…