Pickering Casino, Ontario [CA]

EeStairs + Chris Dikeakos Architects

The buzz of excitement at the Pickering Casino Resort in Ontario, Canada, is heightened the moment people walk into the main entrance, which is dominated by this helical staircase. We took architect Chris Dikeakos’s design and made sure that every detail was built and installed perfectly to create, quite literally, a swirl of expectation.

The continuous ellipse of the staircase rises through more than one complete turn, which makes the stairs the tallest we’ve created for any of our North American clients. And the stairs are efficient in terms of anti-fire details: we added a sprinkler access point on the fourth tread to allow it to be serviced easily.

There were three main technical challenges. The bronze handrail had to go very accurately from curving to flat, and then back to curving because the balustrades levelled at the landings. The building was not weatherproof when we installed the stairs, so we made careful adjustments to the perfectly smooth continuous soffit to overcome weather-related expansion and contraction. And we formed the steel balustrades with great geometric accuracy.