Imber Akse House – Burlington’s LEED home

Clover Valley Ironworks

Finding a company to custom fabricate and install stairs is surprisingly difficult. There are a lot of commodity stair manufacturers that service the production building markets as well as industrial suppliers, but if what you are looking for are architectural, high quality finished stairs to compliment your home and suit your needs, good luck.

We got lucky. We found Clover Valley Ironworks, a Burlington – Hamilton based manufacturer, while sourcing suppliers to fabricate custom metal work for signage and retail displays that we designed. Jon Luff of Clover Valley is a true multidisciplinary artist that can work in most materials and you name it in fabrication techniques.

His love however is stairs and certainly the art of the stair, in all its complexity of math and planning, suits him well. We provided Jon with a design on a napkin and together hashed out a plan that would work to suit our needs and style. Clover Valley is used to working from technical drawings as much as they are well versed in styles and designs to assist homeowners with magazine clippings. They also distribute a range of the very best imported prefabricated metal and wood modern stairs from Edelco, Ferone and Metal Concept if magazine predictability is what you need.

Clover Valley has a great portfolio online to see for yourself how versatile they are in all styles from modern stairs, like ours, to transitional retail fixtures and traditional iron fences and railings.

www.clovervalleyironworks.com

Brian Miller of Creative Woodworks delivered our bar stools that he made for us the other day. Wow, what a beautiful job. These stools integrate into our island so that when we aren’t using them, my obsessive order personality won’t be urged to constantly arrange them.

The great thing about designing for working with artists and craftspeople like Brian is in the collaborative process. We design to our needs and esthetic and the artist uses their experience and guidance to make it work better. The collaborative result is greater than if you just asked someone to make something and follow specification to the letter. As long as the process involves open communication as to what will evolve and for what reason, there are no surprises except for how dam good it can be.

A little about the kitchen and stools. The cabinets are made from solid and veneered walnut harvested locally in Dundas. Many of the Walnut trees in that area are coming to the end of their lifespan and falling naturally where a number of mills are collecting and milling for lumber. The counter tops are both solid Walnut from Dundas and Maple — both protected with a natural oil except for the cooking countertop which is an Ontario granite called Kodiak (brushed). The cabinets are no VOC formaldehyde free veneered plywood and coated with a no VOC waterbase sealer.

Creative Woodworks (905.659.8888) www.creativewoodworks.ca

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Incidentally, some health conscious readers may wish to wade into the learning about Radon and its relation to Granite and new homes. Though we may opt to test our home for radon emissions, we’re not worried with the materials we’ve chosen including this Ontario Granite.Make sure you read the comments following the article as the article is a little leading and fluffy to base an opinion.

http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/07/28/granite-linked-to-high-levels-of-radon-gas-exposure/
http://www.nsraweb.com/forums/news-5/radon-granite-testing-9130.html