#Industry News
New idea for sustainable straight stairs
We won the DNA Paris award for best designed sustainable stairs.
EeStairs’ co-founder and Creative Director Cornelis van Vlastuin explains the origin and development of the EeCorda™ modular stair system to architecture writer Jay Merrick.
JM — EeStairs’ international reputation is based on making and installing feature stairs that are often architecturally spectacular. But you’ve started developing much more straightforward ‘off-the-shelf’ stair systems, such as the EeCorda™. Why?
CvV – Many standard stairs haven’t been designed with serious attention to detail or aesthetics. And when we designed our NextGen™ modular stair system for offices and industrial spaces we realised that this design thinking could be applied to domestic settings.
JM – So EeCorda™ is a modular staircase for homes that doesn’t look modular.
CvV – Exactly, because the combination of materials in EeCorda™ is unique: aluminium treads with an aerofoil section and sound-dampening cores, wooden stringers and handrails, and very unusual V-form balusters made of tensioned rope.
JM – Are there other innovations?
CvV – The EeCorda™ introduces an environmentally aware approach to modular stair materials: low-carbon aluminium, old-growth rubberwood that is treated as a waste product or is burnt after the trees no longer produce latex, and the combination of recycled rope and recycled PET bottles for the balusters.
JM – Is EeCorda™ as straightforward to build as the NextGen™ system?
CvV – Yes. Despite the unusual mixture of materials, we’ve designed EeCorda™ so that it can be configured and costed online by professionals or homeowners with DIY experience, and installed by them. Importantly, they know that our online configurator has already been tried and tested successfully with NextGen™.
