Twenty years of making concrete do what concrete couldn’t.
Szolyd is a precast shop on Vancouver Island with one persistent habit: taking on the pieces conventional concrete can’t do — thinner, stronger, cast to a finish — and shipping them done. The name is the promise: szolyd, say “solid.”
How a glass-recycling shop became a UHPC specialist
Founded on Vancouver Island
Szolyd Development Corp starts casting concrete with an environmental streak — counters, furnishings and surfaces made with post-consumer recycled glass.
The Rialto, and a magazine cover
Restoring the Hotel Rialto’s terracotta columns in white Ductal puts the project on the cover of Construction Canada — and puts UHPC at the centre of everything after. The restoration story →
The first feature stair
The stair tread and riser package for Perkins&Will’s Vancouver office proves UHPC can hold an edge, a span and a finish. The work the shop is now known for starts here. Where that led →
Art, facades and awards
Trapp + Holbrook’s century-old terracotta recreated in 43 molds; the Substation Pavilion and SFU’s EcoSoMo cast for artists and architects; and the Sofi bench, cast for Cristian Arostegui, whose design took the IDS West prototype award.
Szolyd Concrete Corp
The company reincorporates around the UHPC work — Szolyd Concrete Corp, with Trevor Harmon as president and a North American Ductal sublicense in hand.
Prince George Library
UHPC treads and landings for the library’s feature stair — grey Ductal riding wood stringers under glass and timber rails, eight hundred kilometres from the shop.
The UVic stairs
Three feature stairs for the University of Victoria’s student housing and dining project, with Perkins&Will — the flagship of the stair work to date. The case study →
In production
A 33-step feature stair for Telus Ocean at 767 Douglas Street, Victoria. Our treads go in through 2026.
StepClad launches
The stair work becomes a product: StepClad reclads failing exterior steps with new UHPC treads and risers cast as one piece — fitted over the existing structure, no demolition, already in service on the Neptune stairs at Hatley Park. Sold and installed through Orca Masonry, Victoria. The system →
Great stairs made us do this.
We collect the work that keeps us ambitious — stairs and cast elements from anywhere, by anyone. It starts with the one that started everything.
The Loretto Chapel staircase, Santa Fe
Trevor found this stair as a teenager, and never quite put it down — it’s part of why a concrete shop on Vancouver Island obsesses over stairs. Built around 1877–81 to reach a choir loft that had only ever been reached by ladder, it makes two complete turns on a wound wooden stringer — no central pole, no visible means of support.
The sisters told it as a miracle: a nine-day novena to St. Joseph, a stranger with hand tools who built for months and vanished without pay. The record tells it as craft — research attributes the work to French joiner François-Jean Rochas, working spruce that matches no local species, pegged without nails; the railing came ten years later, and the nuns first came down on hands and knees. One wood technologist’s verdict: the inner stringer is wound so tight it works as an almost solid column. Not magic — geometry, done perfectly. That’s the business we decided to be in.
- Built
- c. 1877–1881
- Form
- 33 steps · two full 360° turns · ≈20 ft rise
- Structure
- Laminated stringers · wooden pegs · no newel
- Builder
- Attributed to F.-J. Rochas (research, M. J. Straw Cook)
Apple Park, Cupertino — stairs we admire
Have a favourite stair — anywhere, by anyone? Tell Trevor about it and the board grows.
One person answers. One team of craftsmen delivers.
Trevor Harmon
Trevor leads the shop and answers the projects himself — write to trevorh@szolyd.com.
Shawnigan Lake, BC
Unit 403/404 – 690 Stebbings RdShawnigan Lake, British Columbia
Every piece is cast indoors under controlled conditions and delivered finished — molds, casting and quality control under one roof on Vancouver Island.
Stairs today. Components next. Eventually, a home that lasts generations.
The long project is a kit of parts: modular UHPC components that bolt together the way our stairs and art pieces already do — toward buildings in a material measured in lifetimes, not maintenance cycles.
If it’s worth casting once, it’s worth casting solid.
Tell us what you’re building — a stair, a facade, a piece that doesn’t exist yet.
Start a projectOr write to us directly: trevorh@szolyd.com