Designed to emphasize the unpretentious service and handcrafted coffee for which Elm is known, the warm and bright café on the ground floor of 9th & Thomas is an inviting extension of Elm’s original café in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood. This café and coffee retail space, located in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, spills out into the building’s main lobby and offers a high degree of transparency to the street, inviting passersby to enter and helping establish the lobby as a central community hub. Handmade green tiles from Cerámica Suro in Mexico run along the back wall of the café and are framed by a white marble counter, creating a bright backdrop for Elm’s high-quality coffee and welcoming ambiance.
“For Elm Coffee Roasters, we wanted to create a bright, optimistic backdrop for the coffee experience Elm has so beautifully crafted – one characterized by simple elegance and sincere hospitality.” –Kirsten R. Murray, FAIA, Design Principal
This renovation and addition to a 1920’s era brick Cape Cod involved the addition of a second floor, and a thorough-going renovation to the first floor. A landscape and hardscape plan rounded out the remaking of this home.
A central stair core for this ” sustainable saltbox ” was designed, around which the spaces of the house revolve. The heart of this home is the stair space, with places to hang out, see and be seen, and through which light is brought into the home and reflected throughout.
The Whitefish Poolhouse & Gallery is perched on a steep slope high above Whitefish Lake. Through the process of design, the client chose a more contemporary feel, with the focus being on the 75-ft. single-lane lap pool, a Japanese soaking tub, a changing/shower area, an exercise room and a fine art gallery. The structure appears as a small collection of buildings situated along the hillside and nesting themselves into the contours where appropriate, but boldly contrasting the grades by extending portions of the building out over the steep slope.
The owners of this house loved the location and views but wanted to make some notable updates and expand their less than perfect 80’s era home. The house which sits on a steep slope has a unique layout as you enter from a bridge at the upper living level and descend to the private sleeping areas and ultimately to the lowest garage floor below. The scope of the project included a modest addition on the 2 uppermost floors including a 3rd bedroom/ home office on the mid-level and kitchen expansion on the upper level. In addition, there is a new exterior steel fabricated stairway leading to an expansive new roof deck. The new mid floor bedroom/ office provides a new more direct connection to their private garden, and the expanded upper level is now large enough to accommodate a huge dinner parties prepared in a home chef’s dream kitchen. The powder room has been relocated partially over the stair and under a large custom skylight which allows natural light to seep deep into the lower levels.
Situated on ten acres at the meeting of two rivers near Whitefish, Montana, Confluence House is a fly fisherman's dream. Conceived as a getaway for family and friends, the home’s design is derived and influenced by the geophysics of the surrounding landscape; becoming a seamless addition to the natural environment, rather than an interruption. Views from the toe of the bluff toward the river basin are lush and dynamic, while the distant mountains form a dramatic Montana backdrop.
The initial objective was to design two houses, in a high slope area in the Mount Washington; Los Angeles downtown area.
The property is located on a hill five miles away from downtown Los Angeles. The slopes of the lot are variable. Towards the front of the lot, the slopes oscillate between 15 and 20%, in the intermediate area the terrain is flat and sharpens in the back with slopes of 45 to 50%. The house is located in the center of the lot.
It is a contemporary house built with the objective to make the maximum use of light and natural ventilation, the views of the city and a great connection between the interior and exterior of the house.
For Parachute’s first San Francisco location, Blitz, an award-winning architecture and interior design firm, remodeled an existing retail space into a setting that adhered to the company’s branding standards while remaining sensitive and respectful to its locale. The design team upheld the original architecture of the neighborhood and incorporated location-specific décor and features, a duality seen in all Parachute locations. Spaces are layered to create an immersive, residentially inspired shopping experience with clear circulation and abundant natural light. With custom furnishings, lounge seating, and abstract artwork, the space offers guests a warm and welcoming home-like atmosphere that deviates from the typical retail models of today.
Nevada is a state of two worlds, one of glitz and glamour on the Las Vegas Strip which seeks to transplant imagery from around the globe to mesmerize the minds of 40 million tourists, and the other a rural lifestyle. The latter develops its architecture from local materials, whose vernacular represents function over form.
The Mojave landscape maintains an inherent beauty of textures, stratifications, and materials, as well as a protected oasis of color brought to life under the play of shadow patterns of a harsh sun. These environmental realities can be used as inspiration for design to create a sense of place and character regionalism.
Tresarca has been developed around a simple expression of forms and materials. Separated into functions, the forms create opportunities for protected courtyards, cross circulation within all the spaces and the penetration of indirect natural light. Glamour and glitz have been substituted with purpose.
The materials develop a layering of mass as you move from the basement to the private realm. Each layer is representational of the stratification of the nearby Red Rock Mountains. Change of materials provides the variety of textures associated with the rock formations. Crevices between the masses form an oasis where landscape and water cool the space. The mesh screen provides both a protection from the harsh sun on the interior spaces and a play of shadows among the forms.
Mission Branch Library Renovation, Santa Clara, California
Noll & Tam Architects Breathe New Life into a Treasured Community Asset
Surrounded by City Park and located close to downtown Santa Clara and a number of schools, the Mission Branch Library has been an essential resource to the community since it opened in 1954. Built as the first stand-alone library in the city, the building had received only minor updates since first opening, and was in desperate need of a refresh to enhance comfort, create a more welcoming atmosphere, and bring it into the 21st century.
Noll & Tam Architects is working with the Solano Community College District on the design of their new Library/Learning Resource Center. The new 59,252-square-foot, two-story Library/Learning Resource Center building is envisioned as the symbolic and physical heart of the Fairfield Campus. It will strengthen an existing campus community as it attracts and inspires students by providing needed services such as tutorial, research and group study rooms. The building represents a shift occurring on many campuses where active and collaborative learning has become a priority.
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