fabulous stone staircase for fine watches

Retail and Office

6 Aug

Harrods Fine Watch Room

Rundell Associates were the architects tasked with refurbishing the Fine Watch Sales area in Harrods, Knightsbridge and chose to work with us for the stone fabrication involved. The project was to manufacture and install curved quarter book matched marble panels to the walls and solid marble treads to create a new staircase positioned in an elliptical opening in the floor which links the two areas of the Fine Watch Room. The project was highly commended at the Natural Stone Awards.

stoneCIRCLE also fabricated walnut travertine back panels to the display cases on the wall.

A single block of Cipollino Cremo Tirreno marble was selected in Italy by Mike Rundell, designer and founder of Rundell Associates and sourced through McMarmilloyd of Great Bedwyn for the walls. Crema Marfil was sourced in Spain for the stair treads, apron nosings and floors.

The slabs had to be sawn to different thicknesses, allowing the panels to curve around the walls of the ellipse. The walls and stairs were modelled in 3D by stoneCIRCLE to ensure that these were correctly calculated, from this a cutting schedule with thicknesses and sequence of each slab was sent to the quarry in Italy, and the block sawn accordingly.

The slabs used at each end of the ellipse were thicker to allow for the tighter curves.

The block of marble from which the staircase wall was carved.

Once the slabs were in the company’s Basingstoke factory they were photographed on the Slabsmith photo station and rendered so that the book matching could be worked out.

This was then approved by both the client and architect, before the slabs were cut and shaped on the CNC saws ready to be honed by hand.

The approximate weight of the finished wall panels was 240 kg each and the individual treads were roughly 275 kg, so for installation a ceiling scaffold had to be in place from which was suspended a gantry crane and a chain block hoist.
The walls and tread supports were built by Jaysam in metsec to a drawing agreed with stoneCIRCLE. The walls were of 18mm ply covered by 12mm Wedi board. The original time allowed for the installation was 4 weeks but the company was told that the scaffold and gantry were coming down and had to speed up the installation to have all of the treads and wall panels in place in 2 weeks. The panels were adhesive bonded to the Wedi board and mechanically fixed with stainless steel L brackets and pins.