Aghast at subcontractor bids for a two-section spiral staircase railing, Finnish boat builder Hannu Vartiala combined his affinity for graceful curves with some outside-the-box thinking to produce the satisfying result pictured here. Besides being good-looking and simple to build, the unconventional railing was also easy on the budget: Vartiala reports that the cost for materials (not including his own labor) was just 4 percent of the uninstalled cost of a custom-made wood rail.
