Sea Song is located in the immeasurable natural beauty of Big Sur on the California coast. Unobtrusive by design, it is both private from the main road and utterly transparent to what lies ahead. Likened to a trio of gliding Manta Rays, its environmental footprint is virtually null, being raised on a cantilevered podium causing minimum disturbance to the site.
Article source: Stephen Phillips Architects (SPARCHS)
Giving a face lift to an otherwise aged 1960s Malibu Canyon track home, Stephen Phillips Architects (SPARCHS) creates a sparkling contemporary gem.
Located all too near the notorious Piuma Canyon Brush fires, executive television producer Ted Gold and his wife Cara Hall, a graphic designer, took on the challenge to purchase an all wood-sided shed-roof modern home and transform it into something original and beautiful. Working with a minimal budget one step at a time, they hired local California architect Phillips to make a series of strategic surgical design procedures to update, rejuvenate, and fortify their painfully drab house with elegance and style.
The site design of this small organic farm and residence transitions from a cultivated landscape of orchards, gardens, and farming towards a restored native ecology of meadow grasses and coastal live oaks. The interwoven site and architectural design celebrate the native Northern California landscape and a deep connection to place. The main house is a series of pavilions with rolling zinc roofs that echo waves and wind patterns coming off the ocean, just visible from the property. Striated color patterns in rammed earth walls extrapolate the gentle curve of existing site topography. The building is passively heated and cooled, and energy uses are supported almost entirely by on site harvesting (PVs). The farm includes comprehensive rainwater and graywater harvesting. The project is LEED Platinum certified.
What started out as a relatively minor remodel of a modest bungalow evolved over the course of construction into a new 2,500 s.f. house, with the existing foundation and footprint as the only original elements. The Bojanics acted as owner-builders, keeping construction costs to a bare minimum. The end result was a uniquely collaborative effort; one where the design was worked out on a day-to-day basis during construction in a manner that bordered on improvisation.
The Sinbad Creek House project started in 2008, when the owners – a couple, newly retired from the biotech field and avid horseback riders – decided they wanted to be able to spend more time enjoying the outdoors. Desiring a change from condominium living, they purchased a bucolic 5.3 acre hillside lot in rural Sunol, with unique views in three directions: a beautiful up-slope hillside with mature oaks and a giant walnut tree to the east, a canyon ridge to the west, and Mission Peak to the south. They imagined a modern residence that would embrace its beautiful setting, take advantage of the site’s many vistas, and allow for multiple ways of enjoying the surrounding natural environment.
It’s only fitting that a university building with multiple practices under one roof is employing the use of versatile woven wire mesh, manufactured by Banker Wire.
Banker’s mesh provides strong infill material that also meets the architect’s design intent for exterior stair and pedestrian bridge railings at the new Jacobs Hall on the University of California, Berkeley campus. The three-story, 24,000-square-foot building houses design studios, equipment labs, classrooms, and community space.
Last month, Sonoma Academy, an independent college prep high school located in Sonoma County, broke ground on a 22,000-square-foot expansion project, designed by San Francisco-based architecture and planning firm WRNS Studio. Situated on a 34-acre campus nestled at the base of Taylor Mountain, this marks the first phase of a two-phase campus-wide transformation. Known as the Grange & Studios, the two-level educational facility will add key academic, social and cultural spaces that will support the overall mission of the school. In less than 14 months, the project went from design phase to beginning construction.
Article source: Nakhshab Development & Design, Inc.
Designed, engineered and built by boutique San Diego firm Nakhshab Development & Design (NDD), the LEED Gold-certified Clea House, although just minutes from downtown San Diego, is set on a serene Mission Hills canyon slope. This mid-century modern-inspired single family home complements its surroundings and preserves the existing site terrain with a seamless cantilever design. Elegantly perched on a three-story access column that encases an elevator, a stairway and one “bonus” room per floor, the nearly 4,000 square-foot Clea House functions primarily as a single-level residence in which large open rooms and outdoor spaces flow together with nature prominently on display throughout the home.
The Manna House is for a client who has unusual obsession with color. My initial concept was to use a camouflage palette to blend the house into the hillside. My client wanted the anti-camouflage house. The house takes its inspiration from the abstract color field paintings of Kenneth Noland and Josef Albers. Various shades of blue connect the house -sited on the ridge of a hill- to the the sky that serve as its backdrop. Blue is also a reference to how the house “sails” along the top of the hill like a ship.
RMI-LA is 2,200 SF of new medical offices in Los Angeles for the Retina Macula Institute in an existing office building. This project offers a new look for the renowned retinal specialist institute, and this was achieved under extreme time constraints to avoid interrupting operations.
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