Hôtel Tribe, Courbevoie [FR]

EeStairs + SAS Tétris France

Thierry d’Istria is one of France’s most significant and original interior designers, and his aesthetic originality is immediately obvious in the social hub he designed at the super-trendy Tribe Hotel in La Défense, Paris. The sensuous lines of the staircase is part of an interior composition that balances mo-nochrome surfaces with accents of wood, colour tones and subtle lighting.

Nothing is left to chance in the design, and yet the interior is not ‘designy’ in a trivial sense. ‘Tribe is not a design museum,’ d’Istria explains. ‘We focus on iconic objects, but not ones that have already been seen.’ The staircase is definitely one of those iconic objects – a narrow, white-painted steel helix whose unusually thin balustrades have precise outward folds on their top edges, forming minimalist handrails.

Though white, the stairs create interesting shadow effects, especially where the backs of the risers project below the treads. We are particularly pleased that we were able to make these stairs to meet a very tight schedule, and then install them quickly even though some parts of the hotel were already in use. To minimise disruption inside the building, our installation team brought the stair parts into the building through a window above the top of the stairwell.