Sure, Why Not Build Your House With a 6,000-Pound Spiral Slide and a Glass Floor?

Welcome to Different Strokes, a look at unique home design choices that beg for further explanation.

It’s no surprise that the Pittsburgh-area home where Morgan Kumpfmiller, founder of home construction company American Dreamers Renovations, lives with her husband is a popular destination among kids in the neighborhood. The 6,000-pound spiral slide that swirls down from the second-story porch to the front yard might have something to do with it.

"We sit on the porch a lot. It’s actually brought us a lot closer to our neighbors, being out there and being able to talk to people," says Kumpfmiller. "I will entertain as many slide rides as [kids in the neighborhood] would like. The other day, I had a little girl and boy come from across the street, and we did thirty-two slide rides."

Those 32 rides down the home’s eye-catching copper slide made for a new usage record since Kumpfmiller added the unconventional feature in a renovation by her design-build firm, completed in October 2024. But the slide isn’t the only reason the structure—which won the Builders Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh’s 2024 Housing Excellence Award for "Best Outdoor Living, Existing Home"—stands out. In the HOA development where the cookie-cutter houses follow a similar style, Kumpfmiller’s residence broke the mold even before she updated it: "It was a one-off, but it was an incomplete plantation-style home. When I looked at it, it was always just missing this piece. And I like completion."

The slide also isn’t the home’s only atypical design element: Kumpfmiller added an 800-pound glass floor above the foyer that serves as an interior bridge connecting the upstairs hallway to the second-story porch, which has teak flooring and custom railings, like the porch on the first level. We talked to Kumpfmiller about how installing the glass "bridge" involved using a crane and custom "sled on stilts," and why a slide makes an excellent emergency exit. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How did the idea of a glass floor materialize?

Morgan Kumpfmiller: The house had a high-rise foyer and a big window in the front. I didn’t want to necessarily lose the light from that. I thought, Well, how do we keep the light? The answer was a glass floor. 

It goes over what was previously a grand entryway. There’s no longer a big window, but there are two big steel doors so you can still have the light come in. We’re also big art collectors, and we used to have art all the way up the wall, gallery style, but we still wanted to be able to display art you could see from the ground floor.

What did the installation process look like?

Finding somebody that could produce the glass was not actually all that easy, but we did luck out and found an engineer in California that could get us the specifications for thickness and tempo. Then we found they had somebody in Ohio that would manufacture it. The portion that was actually the simplest was the designing [the floor] and the specifications. The most difficult portion was, How the heck are we going to get it into the house? 

[It’s] on the second story, and it’s 800 pounds and it’s glass, which adds an extra element of danger and fear and financial disaster. So we built a sled on stilts. We used a crane to then set the glass onto the sled and tip it back, then take all of the crating off of it, and then set it gently onto that sled. That sled extended from outside into the house. Once we took the window out, we then opened up the front of the home and it slid into the house. In the house, we had a crank lift that was able to grab the glass and then gently lower it into place.

Where did the inspiration for the slide come from?

I just always wanted a slide at my house, and when I was going to put this cool porch on, part of it was safety. I thought, Well, I’ve got to have a way off the porch. I didn’t want it to be tacky. Then I thought, Well, I could do a spiral staircase. But…those are terrifying. So I thought, Why don’t I just do a slide then? Because it’s really just an emergency evacuation. If you had to get off that level, how would you get out? The slide adds a level of fun—because everybody needs more fun in their life—but also a level of practicality.... If there was a fire or some sort of an emergency, you’re not going to get out more quickly than on a slide.

Which came first: the copper gutters and downspouts or the copper slide?

It just all meshed together because this porch design all came at once. I’ll tell you what was a whoopsie: the roof. We had gone to tie the porch roof into our existing roof, and we found out that, because we had removed the dormers to do that, they were rotted all the way through. We had to completely rebuild them. Then we found out that the large section of the roof was rotted. It’s not an old house. It was only a 15-, 20-year-old house. We weren’t expecting to need a whole new roof. We just thought, We’re this far into it, we might as well just do what we want to do. We loved the idea of copper gutters, so we thought, We’ll put a copper roof on, do the copper gutters, and then we might as well make the slide match.

Top photo courtesy of American Dreamers Renovations.

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