Straight lines are easy. This piece documents an in-house study we set ourselves: a curved stair in bent laminated timber, built to test how far warmth and structure can be pushed together. It began as a way to fill a quiet fortnight and became one of the most useful things we've made.

Why curves

A curve slows you down. On a stair, that is not a flaw but a feature — it turns a purely functional element into a moment of the building you actually notice as you move through it.

There is also a structural honesty to a well-made curve. Done right, the geometry does the work; the timber is loaded along its length rather than fighting the shape, and the result feels inevitable in a way a bolted-together stair rarely does.

Bending timber

Working with a local joinery, we laminated thin strips of timber over a formwork jig, layer by layer, until the assembly held its shape without strain. The tolerances were unforgiving; a millimetre of drift compounds quickly over a full flight.

We got it wrong twice before we got it right. The first jig sprang back further than we'd allowed for; the second delaminated at the tightest part of the curve. Each failure taught us something the drawings never could about how the material actually wants to move.

The details that decide it

Up close, a stair lives or dies on its junctions — where tread meets string, where handrail meets wall, where the curve resolves into the floor. We spent as long on those few centimetres as on the whole geometry, because they are what the hand touches and the eye lingers on.

What we learned

The finished stair, lit from below, reads as a single continuous ribbon. More useful than the object itself was the process — a reminder that craft is the difference between a detail that works and one that feels inevitable.

We've since carried the method into two live projects, and the study now lives in the studio as a full-size fragment. New staff tend to run a hand along it without being told to, which is, in the end, exactly the response we were testing for.