Isabelle Olsson leads industrial design for Google Nest, and the home products she has created are sprinkled around her Silicon Valley house. But you would have to look hard to find them. “The whole design philosophy is for them to blend in so that you don’t even notice they’re there,” says Isabelle.

Indeed, the house—a recently renovated 1962 Eichler she shares with her husband, user interface designer Matthaeus Krenn, and their two children—emphasizes the natural world over the digital.

Matthaeus and Isabelle both studied industrial design and interned at IDEO Munich before moving to San Francisco in 2009. They initially lived in a 400-square-foot studio in the city and commuted daily down to Silicon Valley. “Even though San Francisco is great, it’s not like we were enjoying it—we were stuck in traffic for the most part,” says Matthaeus with a smile.

They always dreamed of designing their own home, and they wanted to shorten their commute, so they started searching for properties in the South Bay. In early 2014, they found the perfect one: a 2,000-square-foot Eichler in Sunnyvale designed by A. Quincy Jones.

“It was January and it was warm—and we were coming from San Francisco, shivering,” remembers Isabelle. “We arrived at this place and it just smelled good. There was a tree, and there were birds, and even though the house was pretty worn down, we saw the potential—the layout was incredible.” They made an offer, and three days later they picked up the keys.

The Eichler had been renovated in the 1980s—complete with shag carpeting, a wall of mirrors, and French shutters—but the floor plan was ideal for indoor/outdoor living, and the central atrium held a magnificent crape myrtle tree dating from the home’s construction.

“Part of what we love is curating a space and being surrounded by beautiful objects—we’re both huge fans of furniture.”
—Matthaeus Krenn, resident

Matthaeus and Isabelle lived in the house for a year and a half, slowly stripping away layers, mocking up lighting, and experimenting with room layouts before deciding to bring on an architect for an extensive remodel.

Matthaeus was browsing Instagram when he discovered a renovated Eichler with an exceptionally well-resolved skylight. He reached out to the architect, San Francisco–based Ryan Leidner, and a few days later Leidner visited the home and signed on to the project. “I feel so fortunate when I’m working with designers, because you can jump right in—we already shared a language,” says Leidner.

Matthaeus, Isabelle, and Leidner proceeded to carve out a serene retreat in the heart of suburban Sunnyvale. They brought on landscape designer Stephanie Stephens of Stephens Design Studio to install flourishing, multilayered gardens in the central atrium and all along the home’s perimeter. “It’s like an oasis—we wanted to live somewhere where you almost didn’t know where you were,” says Isabelle. “It’s our own world.”

The atrium leads to an open living room enclosed by an expanse of sliding glass doors, the frames of which line up perfectly with the home’s structural posts.

“We drew a lot of inspiration from the house itself, but we tried to push it a bit further. We wanted to figure out a way to open the back elevation completely.”
—Ryan Leidner, architect

The couple sought a seamless connection to the backyard, so Leidner proposed forming a second atrium off the kitchen with a new exterior wall that keeps the sliders out of sight. “It’s one thing when the doors sit and stack in the space, but when they’re completely gone, it creates a magical, borderless condition,” says the architect.

This sensation is strengthened by the large gray floor tiles, which run continuously from the edge of the rear garden through the home’s living areas and into the central atrium. A glass door opens the primary bedroom to the pool, which is partially framed by an ipe deck. “I always envisioned getting up, walking barefoot onto a wooden deck, and jumping into the pool for a morning swim,” says Isabelle.

The home’s four bedrooms remain in their original locations, although the couple opted to install a walk-in primary closet and relocate the primary bath to a former office at the northeast corner of the courtyard. In every room, white walls frame views into lush greenery.

“The garden is everywhere—it’s almost like the primary material in the house,” says Leidner. This is partially due to the home’s transparency, which yields other benefits. “I might be sitting in the kitchen writing an email, and my daughter’s playing on the living room sofa, and I can literally look through two panes of glass to see her,” says Matthaeus. “Ultimately, I think that’s where it comes together, where it really pays off.”

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Ryan Leidner Architecture / @ryanleidner

Landscape Design: Stephens Design Studio / @stephensdesignstudio

Construction: Flegel’s Construction

Engineering: Sung Engineering

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A Tree Grows Right Through the Roof of This Radically Updated Eichler