Project Overview & Background
This Malibu canyon home is all natural material and long horizontal lines, and the original stair — carpeted treads, painted balusters — belonged to a different house entirely.
We rebuilt it in rift-sawn white oak. Rift-sawn rather than plain-sawn matters here: it produces a straight, uniform grain without the cathedral figuring of plain-sawn oak, which suits a minimal interior and costs roughly a third more. The balusters are 1/2" blackened steel at close spacing, deliberately thin so the oak reads as the primary material and the metal almost disappears into shadow.
Structural Challenge:
Rift-sawn oak is cut at a specific angle to the growth rings, which produces significant waste and means colour matching across a whole stair requires ordering from a single flitch. We selected and reserved the material before starting demolition.
Engineered Solution:
Rift-sawn white oak from a single flitch for grain consistency, with slim blackened steel balusters kept visually secondary.
It finally looks like it was built with the house rather than added to it.
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