Building a Stairway Down a 35-Degree Cliff: A Shorewood Hills Lakefront Story.
Some jobs you can sketch on the back of a napkin in the driveway. This one was not that job. The homeowners in Shorewood Hills had a place with one of the most beautiful views of Lake Mendota, — a house perched on a bluff with Lake Mendota laid out below, and a rock face dropping nearly straight down to the water. Gorgeous. Also, a problem. Because between that house and that lake sat a 35-degree slope of soil, exposed limestone, and tree roots, and the only way down to the dock was the kind of scramble that ends with somebody calling an ambulance. They wanted real stairs. Safe ones. And they wanted to keep the view that was the main motivation for purchasing the property to begin with. What they got, by the end, was a multi-flight Ipe stairway zig-zagging down the cliff, a couple of decks cantilevered out over the rock so you could stand and look at the water, and stainless steel cable railing thin enough that it almost disappears against the lake. Here’s how it actually came together — start to finish, the real version, including the parts that don’t show up in the pretty photos.
It started with an architect, not a tape measure,
I’ll be honest: my instinct on most stair and deck work is to start measuring and start building. Twenty years in, I can usually see the finished project before I’ve unloaded the truck. But a 35-degree cliff above a lake is exactly the kind of site where that instinct will get you in trouble, and I knew it the first time I walked it. So before anybody drove a single steak in the ground, we brought in an architect to design the layout properly. That meant the full package — the layout, the flight-by-flight plan, the structural approach for hanging stairs and decks off a slope that steep. On flat ground, a set of stairs is a math problem you can do in your head. On a cliff, it’s a three-dimensional puzzle where the ground is falling away from you the whole time, the rock won’t tell you where it’s solid until you’re into it, and every landing has to hit a specific elevation or the next flight doesn’t work. Having a stamped architectural design did two things. It gave us a plan that would actually hold up under load and pass inspection, and it gave the homeowners confidence that the structure anchored to their bluff was engineered and solit, not improvised. On a project like this, that drawing isn’t a formality you pay for to make the permit office happy. It’s the spine of the whole build. Everything that came after — the footings, the stair geometry, the cantilevers — traced straight back to that plan.
Then we had a surveyor and engineer come in to locate exactly where to install the footings.
This is the step most people would skip, and skipping it is how cliff projects go sideways, or fall off the cliff, no pun intended. We hired a surveyor to pinpoint the footing locations. Not “about here.” Exact. On a 35-degree slope, a footing that’s a foot off horizontally is also off vertically by a real amount, and every one of those errors compounds as you work your way down the hill. Each footing had to land in a precise spot and at a precise height, because the stairs and the decks above them were designed to specific elevations. Get a footing wrong, and you’re either re-pouring concrete or fudging the stairs to compensate, and you can’t fudge stairs; people are going to walk up and down in the dark. The surveyor staked the locations so we could build according to the architect’s plan instead of guessing. When you’re working on terrain where you can’t even stand up straight without holding onto something, that survey data is what keeps the build honest. We knew where every post was going before we touched the ground, and we knew it would tie back to the design above and the dock below. After the surveyor marked out the footing locations, our engineer did some soil and rock calculations. Those calculations gave us a solid guideline for anchoring the concrete footings to the rock, which included boring into the bedrock and reinforcing the bond to rock with multiple rebar attachments, keeping the concrete in place and not sliding down the hill.
Ten yards of concrete, poured into a hillside
Here’s a number that surprises people: this project took ten yards of concrete in the footings. Ten yards is a lot of concrete for a stairway. You could pour a respectable driveway with that. But on a 35-degree slope, the footings aren’t just holding the structure’s weight straight down — they’re fighting gravity that wants to slide everything downhill, and they’re anchoring a structure that, in places, hangs out over open air. The steeper the terrain, the harder the footings have to work, and the more mass you need below grade to keep everything where the architect put it. Skimp here and the whole thing creeps, racks, and eventually fails. So we didn’t skimp. Those footings do something a lot of people don’t notice until you point it out in the photos: they let the decks cantilever out over the cliff. Look at the landings that jut out over the rock face — they’re carried on galvanized steel columns set 7 feet into the bedrock, posts that run down to solid bearing while the deck above reaches out past the edge. That’s how you get a place to stand and take in the lake without bulldozing the bluff or fighting the rock for every inch. The cantilever puts the deck where the view is, and the footings and steel make it safe to be there. Galvanized steel was a deliberate call, too. This is a lakefront, wet environment with real freeze-thaw every Wisconsin winter. The hot-dip galvanizing is what keeps those structural columns from rusting out in a decade. On a cliff you only want to build once, and material choices like that are the difference between “built it once” and “rebuilding it after the next hard winter.”
The stairs zig-zag for a reason — and the risers aren’t standard
If you look down the run, the stairs don’t march straight down the hill. They angle — a deliberate zig-zag with landings that change direction. That wasn’t for looks, though it does look good. It was geometry. The goal was to land the run precisely at the edge of the cliff, where the deck and the dock access needed to be. A straight shot down a 35-degree slope either overshoots or undershoots, and you don’t get a second guess on a cliff. By breaking the descent into angled flights with landings between them, we could steer the staircase to touch down exactly where the design called for it, while also giving anyone climbing it a place to pause and catch their breath. On a hill that steep, those landings aren’t a luxury. They’re how you make a long climb, something a person can actually do. Then there’s the part that’ll make any builder do a double-take: the stair risers on this project are 9 1/4 inches, not the usual 7 3/4 inches. Standard residential stairs run a riser around 7 3/4 inches max because that’s the comfortable, code-typical height for everyday stairs inside a home. But this was not an everyday stair on flat ground. To fit the run to a 35-degree cliff and still land it exactly at the cliff edge — without adding flights the slope couldn’t accommodate — the design called for taller risers at 9 1/4 inches. That’s the kind of deviation you make on purpose, as part of an engineered, architect-designed plan for unusual terrain, not something you stumble into. The math of the slope dictated it: a taller riser eats more vertical drop per step, which lets the staircase keep pace with how fast the ground was falling away. It’s a steeper climb than your basement stairs, and it’s meant to be, because the alternative was a run that didn’t fit the cliff it was built on. That’s the thing about building on extreme terrain. The “rules of thumb” are written for flat lots. Out here, you solve the problem in front of you, you document why, and you make sure the design backs you up.
Saving the hillside from washing into the lake
Build a staircase down a bare slope, and you’ve created a brand-new path for rainwater to follow. The first heavy storm, that water finds the disturbed soil around your footings and starts carrying the hillside down to the lake. On a lakefront, that’s not just a maintenance headache — it’s runoff into the water, and it undermines everything you just built. So we brought in a landscape company specifically to prepare the hillside and protect it from washout. Their solution is the part of these photos people ask about most: rows of burlap sacks filled with soil, terraced across the slope, planted with native vegetation. Here’s how that system works, because it’s smarter than it looks. The filled burlap sacks act as immediate, temporary erosion control — the moment they’re placed, they’re holding soil in place and slowing water down so it soaks in instead of sheeting off. Meanwhile, the native plants tucked into them are getting established. Over time, two things happen together: the burlap biodegrades and disappears, and the native plantings send their roots down into the slope and lock the soil in place for good. The sacks are the bridge that holds the hillside until nature takes the job over permanently. I like this approach because it’s honest about time. A lot of erosion “solutions” are either ugly forever or fail the first spring. This one is a little raw-looking on day one and then keeps getting better every season as the plants fill in and the burlap fades away. By the time the native roots have a grip, the slope protects itself. For a lakefront property, that’s exactly the right answer — it keeps the homeowner’s soil out of Lake Mendota and keeps the bluff stable under the stairs we just spent months building.
Why finish it in Ipe
For the deck boards, the treads, and the risers, we used Ipe. If you’re not familiar, Ipe is a South American hardwood that’s about as tough as decking material gets. It’s dense enough that it barely floats, naturally resistant to rot, insects, and decay, and it shrugs off the kind of moisture exposure that turns ordinary lumber into mush. On a project sitting right over the water, where everything gets splashed, rained on, and frozen, that durability isn’t a nice-to-have. The wood on this staircase takes a beating from the lake environment, from foot traffic, and from full Wisconsin weather swings, and Ipe is one of the few materials that handles all of it and still looks rich and warm doing it. There’s a cost to that performance — Ipe isn’t cheap, and it’s harder to work with than softwood, which means more time and the right tools on every cut. But on a cliff you’re only going to build once, over a lake you’re trying to protect, for clients who wanted something that would last, it was the obvious choice. Those reddish-brown treads will silver gracefully over the years if left alone, or hold their color with a little maintenance. Either way, they’ll still be there. (on a side note, Ipe has a 70 to 90m year ground contact lifespan.)
Cable railing, because the whole point was the view
Now the finishing touch, and the one that ties the entire project back to why these homeowners called in the first place. You can do everything right — engineer the structure, nail the footings, build it in Ipe — and then wrap the whole thing in chunky balusters and wreck the one thing the property is famous for. The view. After all that work to put decks and landings exactly where the lake looks best, the last thing anyone wanted was a railing that chopped Lake Mendota into little vertical slices. So the homeowners chose stainless steel cable railing. The cables are thin, horizontal, and run between the posts under tension, which means that from a few feet back, they nearly vanish. You get a code-compliant guard that keeps people safely on the stairs and decks, and you keep the unbroken sweep of water and treeline that makes the place special. Stand on one of those cantilevered landings, and the railing fades into the background while the lake takes over. That’s the entire idea. Stainless was the right metal for the same reason the steel columns were galvanized — this is a wet, lakefront, freeze-thaw environment, and stainless cable and fittings hold up to it without staining or corroding the way lesser hardware would. It’s the kind of detail that doesn’t announce itself but quietly decides whether the railing still looks crisp ten years from now.
What it adds up to
Step back and look at the finished run from the dock, and it reads as one clean, almost effortless line of stairs and decks flowing down a cliff to the water. Effortless is the trick. Underneath that easy look is an architect’s stamped plan, a surveyor’s precise stakes, ten yards of concrete, galvanized steel reaching out over open rock, a stair geometry custom-solved for a 35-degree drop, a hillside engineered not to wash away, hardwood chosen to outlast the weather, and railing designed to get out of the way of the view. None of those pieces is optional on terrain like this. Pull one out and the whole thing gets worse — less safe, less durable, or less beautiful. Getting all of them right, in the right order, is the job. That’s what turns a cliff most people would call unbuildable into a stairway where you can carry a cup of coffee down on a fall morning to sit by the lake. If you’ve got a steep lot, a bluff, or a lakefront slope around Madison, Shorewood Hills, or anywhere in Dane County and Wisconsin, and you’re wondering whether it can even be done, it usually can. The question is whether it’s done right. If you want a straight read on what your terrain will actually take, reach out. I’ll walk it with you and tell you the truth about what it needs, the same way we did here.
Tim Quigley,
Quigley Decks.
www.Quigleydecks.com
