The Venice Beach Contemporary Craftsman, or VBCC House, started as a renovation project for a growing family’s small bungalow-style home. The design goal was to create an open, connected space that would flow from front to back, making it perfect for entertaining and taking advantage of the cool Pacific breeze. Glass sliders on either end of the house allow for the wood flooring and ceiling to seem to extend into the decks and surrounding landscape.
As you approach the house from the street, you’re led along a wall of charred wood and an exposed cantilevered glulam beam, up concrete steps to the unique entry door, which features a built-in filtration planter that extends into the house through the large side lite of glass. A second floor was added that includes three bedrooms, accessed via a central open stairwell filled with light from large northwest-facing windows and three skylights. The highest skylight is designed to be opened, allowing natural ventilation to circulate air throughout the house.
The main bedroom has a private balcony with views of the Santa Monica Mountains and a wood railing that extends into the room and becomes an architectural built-in headboard and wainscoting. Clerestory windows in the main suite allow the wood vaulted ceiling to extend out to the eaves, creating a sense of the roof floating above the structure. The main bathroom has a low wall with a frameless glass transom that unifies the suite while maintaining privacy and keeping the view of the corner window, which provides natural light for the tub.
The VBCC House was designed with special attention to fenestration and orientation, ensuring that natural lighting, ventilation, and privacy were balanced throughout the structure. This, along with the use of natural materials and a visual connection to the landscape, creates a calming oasis within the vibrant atmosphere of Venice Beach.
This property has an amazing view of Beverly Hills and the Pacific Ocean, but only a limited amount of flat land adjacent to the street, before it descends steeply into a canyon. The challenge was to increase the useable area of the property, while maintaining privacy from the surrounding properties.
By keeping the proposed home as close to the street as possible, we were able to create enough space for the pool and garden. An L-shaped configuration would also provide privacy from the neighbors behind. To avoid an entry directly on the street, we carved out a courtyard space to drop light into the basement, and used a bridge to provide more of a feeling of entry.
When the previous homeowners of a charming mid-century modern house in San Francisco enlisted Klopf Architecture to remodel the interior and make minor exterior updates, they could never have anticipated how their project would pave the way for an extraordinary transformation. The new homeowners, a young family of four, had a vision for the house that went beyond its original character, blending modern, minimal design with the existing mid-century aesthetic.
The Economic Advancement Center (EAC) is a job training and employment resource center, serving the community through a partnership between the City of South San Francisco, Job Train, Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center and the County of San Mateo. For this project, William Duff Architects (WDA) transformed the former bank space, injecting energy and vitality into a shared workplace with open and private offices, meeting rooms and job training facilities. The team created an efficient design that could be delivered quickly, minimizing supply chain delays and allowing for maximum value from the City’s budget. The result is that the EAC feels more akin to an enticing start-up environment, rather than a government facility. The lobby’s green wall creates a welcoming vibe and functions as both a visual focal point and as a divider, housing the Center’s public resource library and the innovation classroom area behind it. EAC’s positive out-comes are two-fold: it tapped the transformative power of architecture and design to create a welcoming space for local job seekers and entrepreneurs, and from a practical standpoint, activated a long-vacant city property, creating a model for revitalizing cities.
William Duff Architects (WDA) acted as Project Architect for Ireland House, the new LEED Gold home of three Irish government agencies housed under one roof. The project involved the tenant improvement of the entire 9,755 square feet of the entire floor of a Class A office building in San Francisco. The firm wrapped the core in warm wood paneling along with additional soffit details to create a visual shared hearth that can be experienced throughout the workplace. The “hearth” visually and culturally connects the three programs while allowing each agency to have its own identity. The project also features secured zones and a flexible assembly space that can be used for consulate events that are open to the public.
On a complex multilevel lot overlooking the city of Beverly Hills, this project was designed to take advantage of the beautiful views of the city below, as well as the entire Los Angeles basin. The house is inspired by the rich history of modernism in California, in both its plan and material choices. Open in concept and focused around the pool and garden area, the upper level blends seamlessly with its surroundings. Programmatic requirements for additional space and the city’s restrictions on grading led to a design that wrapped the lower level around a basement courtyard, to draw as much light as possible deep into the floor plan.
Interdisciplinary Architecture’s (IA) new studio for LinkedIn’s Media Productions team part of LinkedIn’s Sunnyvale, California campus is designed to foster creativity and support highly technical video production processes, all while keeping employees safe in the post-pandemic age. The design seamlessly blends workspaces for visioning, storyboarding, and workshopping with state-of-the-art studio environments, bringing creative and technical teams under one roof to streamline video-on-demand and live broadcast content production.
The oasis-like Verdant Sanctuary with its California xeriscape landscape that provides a buffer zone between the building and the street offers a pastoral and poetic break in an existing row of workaday buildings. Located in Palo Alto’s Stanford Research Park, Verdant Sanctuary neighbors a 1953 building designed by German architect Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953) the original research-and-development facility that started Silicon Valley. Designed by Form4 Architecture, Verdant Sanctuary expresses its embrace of nature through each design element. It will be made almost entirely of mass timber and glass, and its dramatic roof design echoes the shape of a bird’s wings. Form4’s design plays off of the vernacular tradition of California Modernism, revisiting forms by inverting gable roofs and opening up the building enclosure to nature.
The dynamic architecture of the Innovation Curve at Stanford Research Park celebrates the creative process of technology, which is fundamental to the international success of Silicon Valley. The peaks and valleys of sweeping metal curves serve as architectural metaphors for the highs and lows of exploratory research and development. Designed by Form4 Architecture of San Francisco, the new development comprises four buildings on the edge of Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto. The LEED Platinum-certified project contributes to the site’s emergence as an uplifting campus for tenants involved with computer gaming, translation software, and digital inventions. Representing the evolution of innovation on the face of the buildings, the lyrical design serves as a potent visual reminder of the dedicated, expansive, and intense work taking place inside.
Size: 288,000 total square feet in four buildings on 13.5-acre campus: Building 1: 66,700 square feet; Building 2: 66,700 square feet; Building 3: 77,000 square feet; Building 4: 77,000 square feet
San Francisco-based Spiegel Aihara Workshop (SAW) has completed the transformative architectural and landscape design of a 1962 home in Mill Valley for a couple and their two young children. The project, known as The Middle Half, dramatically reconfigures the home’s core to create an open, light-flooded interior and direct connection to the landscape. Raw, textured materials like galvanized steel, rough-sawn cedar siding, and cast-in-place concrete define the project and accentuate its unexpected, layered geometries.
“Often when thinking about preserving a thing a structure, an object, a landscape, a city one talks about preserving its ‘heart’ or it’s ‘core.’ But in this case it was the opposite we were trying to preserve the periphery, while completely reimagining the core,” says SAW co-principal Dan Spiegel.
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