The Royal Exchange

Fitting for a landmark location

Staircase • Balustrades

Alpine was approached after a strong recommendation. We were asked to deliver three extremely high-quality feature staircases in the Fortnum & Mason store at The Royal Exchange in London. This was an iconic London location, where visitors can shop and eat at the Bar and Restaurant. We had to remove the existing stairs but it was imperative the store remained open with minimum disruption to visitors. This meant we needed to complete all our work during the night hours.

We had to structurally design the staircases, and work with the stone companies so they could cut their stone to our templates. Due to tight programme timings, these had to be taken from our CAD software.The balustrade had to be kept as thin and minimalistic as possible, whilst still meeting all safety building regulations and loading requirements. Special software was used to design the material thicknesses and the connections. We also utilised special rolling formulas to roll the unique oval stainless-steel handrail. All connections had to be ‘secret fixed’ with no visible welds and coated with a special PVD coating that cannot be touched on site. This meant dry fitting all balustrade work. We had extremely accurate templating and dry fitting.