Articles

• 

  Bay Wash

  With a presence in three centuries, Christi Azevedo’s Victorian survived the quake of 1906 and served as a laundry before its rebirth as a well-lit hybrid of old and new.

• 

  Top Notch

  Tom Hanks is not known for horror films, but his 1986 flop, The Money Pit, has a terrifying premise: A seemingly small renovation consumes a couple’s life, devouring their reserves of time…

• 

  Highway Hideaway

  Most beachfront houses treat the ocean as part of the visual landscape with panoramic views and wraparound balconies. Tom Lloyd-Butler’s beach house by Ernest Born, however, is deeply interior, and…

• 

  Mid-Century Mash-Up

  Although postwar California modernism is generally associated with Southern California, the Bay Area’s own tradition has begun in recent years to be more widely acknowledged, and its surviving…

• 

  Taking Liberties

  Designed and built in 1878 for Judge John Murphy, a 4,400-square-foot white structure has, from the outside, the undeniable characteristics of a classic San Francisco Victorian. Stepped back from…

• 

  Worth the Wait

  Tucked into the side of a scenic San Francisco hill, one of the city’s more diminutive houses battles everything from dry rot to obstructionist neighbors in order to grow up.

• 

  San Francisco Is for Louvers

  It may not be to Queen Anne's tastes, but 1234 Howard is true to its context.

• 

  Mission Statement

  A house that survived the Great Quake and the intervening decades is reborn after a serious intervention by a modernist architect. David Baker’s carefully crafted rehabilitation kept the…

• 

  Standout in a Crowd

  In architecturally conservative San Francisco, this house built on a 20-foot-wide lot proves that modern design can fit—literally and figuratively—in any neighborhood.

• 

  Fuseproject

  In the San Francisco offices of Yves Béhar’s industrial design and branding firm, the work environment 
suits the work.

• 

  Park 'N Play

  It could have been a Sheetrock box, but as the house’s most frequently used point of entry, it deserved the same architectural respect.

• 

  Stoked to Soak

  Compelling custom solutions to off-the-shelf problems are often hard to come by. But landscape architects James A. Lord and Roderick Wyllie relished the challenge of making a standard hot tub the…

• 

  Fawning Over Flora

  Flora Grubb Gardens, the hippest plant merchant in the Bay Area, takes up residence in a new building as green as it is frondescent.

• 

  Beyond Terradome

  Influenced by city dwellers whose windows open to concrete vistas or brick walls, San Francisco native Ric López decided to shift the view inward and back to nature.

• 

  Open Kitchen

  A San Francisco architect turns his “inefficiency” kitchen into a modestly scaled and well-lit place to cook, eat, work, and enjoy the view—–even with his back turned.

• 

  Model Worthy

  The true test of a kitchen’s mettle is not how it looks brand-new, but how it looks after a decade of wear and tear from heaving cleavers and spilling sauce.

• 

  Design for the Public

  Public Architecture forges ahead into uncharted territory, and creates a model for fitting pro bono work into the daily practice of every firm.

• 

  Where the Sidewalk Ends

  After taking on San Francisco City Hall, architect Jane Martin helped spawn a movement that has rendered the city’s sidewalks more hospitable to birds, bees, butterflies—and even to…

• 

  Noe Valley Renovation

  It's rare that in a resident-architect collaboration, the resident picks the more dramatic design scheme than the architect. But the homeowners of this recently renovated San Francisco Victorian…

• 

  Victorian Revival

  A couple’s dinner out at their neighborhood bistro provides just the right impetus for their restaurant-inspired kitchen renovation.