Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut ut felis ac enim sodales consequat, Etiam tincidunt sagittis. Quisque fringilla, sapien a rhoncus lobortis, sem odio maximus ante, nec imperdiet odio purus id augue. Pellentesque neque ipsum, dapibus eleifend tempor vitae, pulvinar ut velit.

When we began work on The Social Network’s 28,000 square foot cafeteria / auditorium, we focused on the diverse performative aspects of the hybrid program to drive the architectural response. The cafeteria, open and lively, needed to be able to accommodate up to 3,500 employees and guests for any given meal as well as expand into the adjacent courtyard. The auditorium then needed to close, armadillo-like, into a secure environment for weekly a “all hands” presentation and global simulcast. A pixelated, undulating ceiling surface of vertically hung acoustical panels swathed in shades of blue reinforce the sight lines required for the auditorium use, while creating compressed, intimate dining zones in ancillary areas of the space. To aid in the transformation of the space from cafeteria to dining, the floor is patterned with color coded table and chair registers for three different seating scenes that act as a cleverly utilitarian decoration. Diners are channeled through two separate queuing zones: to the kitchen interface and into the dining space. The queuing zones, designed with The Social Network’s interaction designers, are lit with soft 8-bit LED interactive walls that create a visually rich and active space while people wait. Taking advantage of our extensive hospitality experience, we were also tapped to design the campus’ burger shack and pizza place. The food concepts, independent from the main cafeteria, add to the neighborhood feel of the The Social Network grounds and complement the playfulness and casual work environment.

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Our long-time clients sought to create a private retreat hidden in the forested hills of Northern California, a house where an extended community of family, friends, and colleagues could gather.

The proprietors envisioned Radhaus as a contemporary gathering place pairing the convivial, communal essence of a German beer hall with contemporary interpretations of traditional Bavarian cuisine.

The Octavia Project seeks to create people-centered spaces where people gather, form new connections, and develop new ideas and relationships. Our vision of the project revolves around three core concepts; Pathway (Marking Memory), Forum (Building Community) and Gateway (Dreaming the Future).

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Claire Bigbie first learned about envelope a+d while dining with a friend at Delfina Pizzeria, a restaurant project of ours, which had just opened in San Francisco. She called us later that day and asked us to design her house. Claire, then a photo stylist for ReadyMade magazine, had moved to San Francisco a year earlier after working as a design assistant for Precious McBaine, the hip London interiors firm. But Claire has been attuned with design as far back as she can remember. Growing up, Claire moved often, from Seattle to Los Angeles to Paris and back to Seattle. She remembers ritually reconfiguring the decor of her various bedrooms and finding a strong affinity to the objects in her life as they were the things that remained constant to her. As a teenager back in Seattle, she created her own skateboard clothing line and learned graphic design working in Jeff Kleinsmith's (Sub Pop Records) screen printing studio, eventually designing for Seattle’s Tooth+Nail records, all before enrolling at RISD where she earned a degree in industrial design. Claire and her partner Jay Shapiro are both skateboard fanatics and are also engaged in rock music culture and high design worlds. Jay, an amateur skateboard photographer and former team manager for Think Skateboards, is a bassist for Space Vacation, a local heavy metal band. In 2005, Claire and Jay purchased a tattered Victorian duplex— two stacked flats with a typical series of dark, cellular rooms—in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood. The renovation design conceives of the home as two distinct worlds sculpted to fit their uses: a surprisingly eclectic upstairs flat for living and a more matter-of-fact rendering for Claire’s lower level creative studio. In both flats, the first move was to erase the warren of partitions in the back third of the house, creating stacked live and work spaces that take advantage of the light and openness of the interior of the residential block. Upstairs, the newly opened space developed into kitchen/living/dining space. The floor and the ceiling were pared back to its rough surfaces, exposing the gabled roof volume with its rough-sawn collar ties and raw redwood wood boards of the underside of the roof. The original douglas fir subfloor was extensively patched and left raw. The kitchen was designed with only lower cabinetry to allow spatial continuity between the shared functions of the room. The cabinets’ hemlock veneer lowers and a large central island with a reclaimed black walnut top define the working space of the kitchen. A single long shelf cantilevers from the new window wall, replacing what typically would have been solid upper cabinets, creating an ideal display shelf for Claire’s collection of Dutch and American designer glassware and porcelain. A dining nook—articulated as a wood box clipped onto the larger gabled living space—has hemlock veneer plywood walls that warp into a comfortable bench extending across the back wall. At the other end of the room, an informal sitting area, with its lower center of gravity, is inflected in plan to allow for casual TV viewing. A tapered wall of white cabinetry draws the line of the entry / hallway wainscoting into the room, collecting the flat screen TV and housing both pantry and media. Above the line of the high gloss wainscot, Erica Wakerly reflective wallpaper extends the light at the back of the house all the way to the front door. The bathroom disorients as it throws you to the bottom of a swimming pool. The room recreates one of Claire and Jay’s favorite feelings: dropping in and out of an emptied pool on skateboards. A Bisazza mosaic tile wall wraps to the floor while a white plaster warped ceiling surface is used as a towering reflecting plane. Plumbing fixtures plainly mount on the sinuous wall of gray shower stucco. Concrete pool coping creates a deep shelf for shower potions. The master bedroom inhabits the former front sitting room, where a defunct fireplace is re-imagined in light cyan, crating a bright focus for the room. The adjacent dressing room is remade with geometric Cole & Son wallpaper by Tom Dixon. A snow-globe collection lives in a recessed case, locked behind glass like precious high school football trophy. Claire’s studio is rendered plainly, but chromatically. Orange laminate cabinetry, pink powder-coated off-the-shelf shelf brackets, a deep purple ceiling and blood-red bathroom emerged from a color palate that Claire has given us within the first week of working. Worthwood end-grain plywood flooring extends through the space, lending a raw studio feel. An aluminum and glass garage door opens up the back sitting area to a rear deck and the Palm Springs-inspired garden design by Flora Grubb.

Safe Passage Park (sPark) is the first major project underway as part of TL Transforms, an initiative to build community power and agency through an emergent engagement process resulting in physical streetscape improvements and programming throughout the Tenderloin.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut ut felis ac enim sodales consequat, Etiam tincidunt sagittis. Quisque fringilla, sapien a rhoncus lobortis, sem odio maximus ante, nec imperdiet odio purus id augue. Pellentesque neque ipsum, dapibus eleifend tempor vitae, pulvinar ut velit.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut ut felis ac enim sodales consequat, Etiam tincidunt sagittis. Quisque fringilla, sapien a rhoncus lobortis, sem odio maximus ante, nec imperdiet odio purus id augue. Pellentesque neque ipsum, dapibus eleifend tempor vitae, pulvinar ut velit.

As a gift to our beloved Earth and to us all, we initiated planting hundreds of trees to start out each year!

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut ut felis ac enim sodales consequat, Etiam tincidunt sagittis. Quisque fringilla, sapien a rhoncus lobortis, sem odio maximus ante, nec imperdiet odio purus id augue. Pellentesque neque ipsum, dapibus eleifend tempor vitae, pulvinar ut velit.

Challenged with taking a five story spec home and infusing a feel of elegance and the charm of a classic San Francisco Victorian, Envelope worked closely with the talented interior design team at the Office of Charles de Lisle to create a family home and sanctuary with the dual purpose of hosting events at a variety of scales.

PROXY is a temporary open space activating two vacant parcels in the heart of San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood.

To mark its 20th anniversary The French Laundry undertook an extensive renovation of the renowned restaurant’s historic property.

When an industrial building near their Berkeley office became available, the creative agency John McNeil Studio asked Envelope to turn it into the ultimate flex space: a place for video shoots, lectures, strategy sessions, art openings, and much more.

Kindred is a re-configurable, re-deployable planter-seating system composed of three modules and designed to add visual and functional dimension to multi-purpose open space.

The Hunters Point Shoreline is a new public open space born out of a far-reaching public, interim use, and community engagement strategy for the former Hunters Point Power Plant site.

2214 is a curatorial overlay to our practice, an experiment exploring the possibilities that arise when practitioners from divergent areas of interest come together to consider a set of common questions.

For the launch of Focals, a new line of smart glasses, North asked for a scalable system that could translate a complex customer journey into a gracious, intuitive experience. Adaptability was key.

The Pilara Foundation chose to create a home for its critically acclaimed photography collection in an unlikely location: a historic timber-framed warehouse perched over the San Francisco Bay.

The Pacific Gas and Electric Hunters Point site is a multi-faceted property with complex social and historical connections to the surrounding neighborhood.

CHROMA, a new mixed use development in the heart of Midtown Tucson, brings a dynamic infusion of commercial, office, residential, and community uses to a changing neighborhood.

Situated at the gateway to West Oakland, this project imagines a vibrant future for a former pipeworks factory.

Expanded Field, the book, and the installation from which it evolved, is both an expression of our passion for installation work and an exploration of the overlapping territories of contemporary practice.

Aether Apparel, an online retailer that specializes in design-conscious technical outerwear, chose our PROXY project in Hayes Valley as the site of its first stand-alone store. Aether wanted a striking physical presence with the unconventionality of a pop-up venue. They were drawn to our use of shipping containers at PROXY as highly customized modular units that are built to be durable rather than disposable, bold instead of drab.

Designed, prototyped and fabricated in our shop, the Trap Table leverages the tessellating ability of half hexagons to create a system capable of a multitude of configurations.

Set along Octavia Boulevard, lots M+N are among the most challenging of the 22 development parcels created when the Central Freeway was removed. The 120-foot-wide parcels are just 18 feet deep, defying typical housing configurations.

At first glance, a run-down Victorian seemed like an unlikely home for the founder of John McNeil Studio and his family.

Designed for a contractor and his wife, who were living in a San Francisco loft but wanted to move to the Silicon Valley to be closer to their work, this house takes on the spatial and material qualities of the urban loft and exports them to the suburbs. The generating idea for the house is the Japanese garden design strategy of shakkei, or borrowed landscape. The section and siting of the building work together to screen the suburban “middle ground,” pulling the distant views of the Santa Cruz Mountains into the fore. With this strategy, the distant landscape becomes the fourth wall of the primary living and sleeping spaces, blending domesticity with an ever-changing sense of nature. The interior space extends into the landscape through a wall of garage door bays that completely open the loft-like living space to the garden. By placing the hearth in the garden, the living space is re-centered within the garden itself. The Los Altos House, urban in language and sensibility, both exists in a suburban context and actively erases this context by replacing the inhabitants’ glimpses of suburbia with views of the natural landscape. The created and borrowed garden provides a new context for the house: a simulated Arcadia situated in an American middle landscape.

CMY saw horse tables are available in cyan, magenta and yellow leg dip. Fabricated out of hickory hardwood, these saw horses pay homage to classic work-shop saw horses, but simplify and minimize joinery to emphasize the graphic quality of the iconic saw horse shape. Tables were designed and fabricated at envelope a+d, in Berkeley, California. Limited production run. Please email info@envelopead.com for pricing and general inquiries. Local pick up required.

A house for a structural engineer and his family in the Berkeley hills, the project expresses structural elegance in the cantilever of the new top floor master bedroom. The design seeks to open the spatial relationships to the surrounding site: to an entry courtyard at the front, to a garden at the base and the kitchen and to the expansive bay view at the back.

envelope A+D gets a lot of requests for shipping container design due to our wildly successful project PROXY in San Francisco. This project, a temporary coffee bar for a large tech company in Mountain View, started as one such inquiry. The client wanted the outdoor cafe to be inexpensive and quickly deployable. While a shipping container was suitable theoretically, onerous permitting restrictions pushed us to devise a different solution: the _dock. The _dock is a food+drink pavilion composed of sets of tubes and screens. The pavilion is activated by any food truck that docks, creating virtually limitless programming possibilities. A light blue ground graphic creates an intuitive queueing system while simultaneously defining the exterior space. The pavers were flipped over and the underside was painted to allow for an easy eventual dissolution of the space. Though _dock is currently a one-off installation, we designed it with a series of pavilions in mind that would share a formal language but wouldn’t formally be the same. The pavilion’s easily adaptable nature and cost-effectiveness add up to a prudent system for providing places of rest and refuge amidst the hustle and bustle of the company’s campus.

This home for an art collecting family was shaped by two primary design parameters: make no visible alterations to the house’s traditional front facade while transforming the interior into a modern open living space that integrates the client’s extensive collection of contemporary art. Within this home, a critical density of contemporary art makes one question the normal "stuff" of houses - switches, walls, doors, sinks. The design seeks to create a heightened level of engagement by blurring the line between normal living and art experience. The main living floor retains all of the original uses, but opens up the physical relationships between the rooms. Living, dining and entry at the front interlink with family, kitchen and informal dining at the back. The front suite of rooms are rendered more purely, with the normal house tectonics - windows, doors, light switches, outlets - concealed or obscured. The rear suite is completely open to one another while retaining some more recognizable elements of home. The east edge of the main level is a series of art chambers running from front to back: stair hall, powder room and library. The existing curvilinear stair hall was reinterpreted from a figural void to a spiral object by opening up the cubic volume of the stair hall and enhancing the sinuous surface of the guardrail wall. The powder room is open to the hallway, providing view to a small exterior light court with a wall-mounted Robert Gober drain. The library is a rendered as a large vitrine, itself a microcosm of the vitrine of the house. Upstairs the master bath and changing area merge into a single room in which differing material expressions define the room’s dry and wet zones or functions. The living spaces of the house are predominately white to support of the display of art, while storage spaces are rendered in varied and intense hues that express storage as a series of intensive events scattered throughout the house. The design of the house involved a simultaneous discussion of the curation of the house with the client, including how, where, and what pieces of art would be displayed. The project also involved working with Robert Gober (drain), Lawrence Weiner (text), Felix Schramm (deconstructed wall) , Mungo Thompson (celestial ceiling photomural) and Roy McMakin (trapped cabinet) on the coordination of artworks that were embedded within the architecture.

The Coffee Pavilion at the Slow Food Nation Taste Hall is conceived of as a filter for experience. Three sheer fabric enclosed Coffee Halls remove the visitor from the activity of the larger event. These tasting chambers offer a more intimate taste experience and allow visitors to focus on the cup in their hand, the nuances of the brew, the discussion with an expert. Coffee experts serve a flight of three to four coffees over a 12 minute session, teaching the differences in region, quality and roasting techniques. The pavilion design is framed by an ethic of reuse. Scaffold, traffic barriers, folding tables are all rented items that will continue to be reused long after this event. The sheer voile fabric will be donated to the CCA Fashion Design Department for use by their students. The coffee bars are structured by an assemblage of discarded chairs, which will be reconditioned after the event. Purchased materials are either sustainable in their production or will be repurposed as building materials. More finely constructed elements - the coffee bars - will be reused for future events. Curators Andrew Barnett, Ecco Caffe Eileen Hassi, Ritual Coffee Roasters Tony Konecny, tonx.org

Inspired by a field trip to the birthplace of pizza, Delfina's pizzeria is an interpretation of the best of the Neapolitan Pizzerias, which are at once plain, urban and functional. A white-tiled floor and wainscot are a crisp textural container for the hickory bar and banquette, which bracket an all-stainless steel kitchen. Honed slate wall panels line the wall as you enter the space and display the changing fare of the day.

Inspired by a field trip to the birthplace of pizza, Delfina's pizzeria is an interpretation of the best of the Neapolitan Pizzerias, which are at once plain, urban and functional. A white-tiled floor and wainscot are a crisp textural container for the quartersawn oak bar and banquette, which bracket an all-stainless steel kitchen. Honed slate wall panels comprise one full wall of the dining room and display the changing fare of the day. A new floor to ceiling storefront opens the space to the lively neighborhood streetscape.

The Burlingame location marks the first Pizzeria Delfina outside of San Francisco. We wanted to retain the essence of the original pizzerias without relying on the rote application of a set of aesthetic rules that is often leaves “chain” restaurants that feeling soulless and impersonal. Instead, we devised a nuanced strategy that would allow the qualities unique to Pizzeria Delfina — an intimacy between patron and cook; an open kitchen that serves to energize and entertain the dining area; a heightened level of service — to shine through in any space or city while also feeling well-suited to each context. Case in point: Burlingame’s warmer climate makes it possible for a stronger outdoor dining culture to flourish, and the Pizzeria’s sizable patio is a first for any of chef/owner Craig Stoll’s concepts. The South Bay location’s considerably larger interior allowed us to include a refined, wooden mezzanine-level dining area that overlooks the kitchen and can function as a private dining room. The main dining area is flooded with natural light and offers the most direct experience of the cooking and food preparation happening behind the bar. Material similarities are extended throughout each location, but not to an inflexible degree, and only as far as they pay homage to the Neapolitan pizzerias that started it all. We invented a pixelated tile floor pattern that riffs on a traditional Italian mosaic motif by blowing it up to an ultra-magnified scale. Each outpost of Pizzeria Delfina has a chalkboard that displays the wait list; in Burlingame, the entire facade is fair game for people to doodle with chalk while they wait. Each Pizzeria Delfina also has a mural of the classic Bay of Naples scene, reinterpreted for the San Francisco Bay. The classic depiction shows Naples as a thriving place of abundance overflowing with fruits of the land and the sea. But, always looming over the prosperity is Mount Vesuvius, a quiet reminder that nature is a powerful and ruthless force. PD Burlingame’s mural, rendered in the cartoon literalist style of SF-based artist Sirron Norris, is positioned to show diners precisely where they are in relation to landmarks of the Bay Area. The representation is jumbled and distorted, as if the earth’s plates had already given way to an earthquake, northern California’s own Mount Vesuvius.

In response to the often foggy, windy microclimate of the Pacific Heights neighborhood in San Francisco, we designed an interior courtyard space at the center of this new penthouse addition. This space links the family room, view deck, playroom, tree deck and a guest bedroom suite by creating an interwoven matrix of interior and exterior spaces. This matrix of spaces blurs the distinction between inside and out and provides the surprise of sky, trees, wind, water and light to the previously closed, cellular flat. The primary mediator of these interior and exterior spaces is a mahogany wall, which weaves in, out and around the major spaces of the home. This serpentine wall transforms its character to meet the functional and spatial qualities of the particular room it serves: a horizontal wood lattice encloses the exterior tree deck, unfolding to become the interior courtyard wall; sliding door panels provide passage through the wall to exterior decks and to private rooms.

Designing Locanda required a reflection of the restaurant’s reinterpretation of Roman cuisine. Chef Anthony Strong and Craig Stoll spent two months in Rome and its surrounding Lazio region meticulously researching its ingredients and dishes. Back in town, they interpreted these classic food traditions through a San Francisco sieve. Our efforts paralleled theirs in understanding the essence of Roman locanda (Inns), informal trattoria and congenial osteria, combining these influences through a contemporary urban sensibility. In using polarized qualities like loud and quiet, light and dark, modern and ancient, envelope a+d crafted a spatial organization that played with fusing different worlds into the experience of great food. Balancing volume and movement was key in designing a bustling social space; the heaviness of the black walnut wainscoted walls and seated patrons are kept below a distinct horizon, allowing the lightness of the colors, movement, illumination, and aural reverberations to float above. Stretching from the entry door to the rear is a massive faceted black walnut bar, acting as a binding element joining together the front and back dining spaces into a unified whole. Diversifying this large space seemed critical in extending the casually gourmet trademark of the owners’ neighboring Delfina and Delfina Pizzerias; the front and bar are invitingly informal and open to the dynamic nightlife of the Mission District, while the back submerges into the kitchen, tucked beyond the view of the street and simmering with a focus on dining experience. A heavy black marble and blackened steel communal table grounds the activity of the front dining space, while a white marble clad wait station table creates a center for the bustling staff in the rear dining room. Gourmet meats are enclosed as precious materials on display inside a suspended stainless steel Guanciale case, joining the kitchen with the rear seating area. As cured pork parts are vital to authentically Roman dishes, we used this exposed case to highlight this importance; cured meats are physically pulled from the view of the guests, and then returned to them cooked, accentuating an awareness of Journal. An imported Italian wood-fired grill takes its place at the front of the cooking line, serving up rotisseried guinea hen, grilled lamb, fish and other foul and scenting the air with the earthy smell of the live fire. As a result the kitchen is neatly folded into the ambiance, without a door or strong boundary the food mingles with guests, its smells and sounds embedded into the experience. This blending of old and new ideas is also illustrated in the details of a coffered ceiling, recalling ancient classical design and employing a performative acoustic utility for neutralizing noise. Lower absorptive surfaces linger over the dining room pockets, whereas deep cut-outs disperse the commotion of the entry, bar, and kitchen zone. The resulting cubical asymmetry runs into a sort of infinite pattern over the mirrored wall above the bar. Hand-cut white Heath tiles adorning the walls also similarly evoke an emphasis on the line. We assembled the tiles onto the walls with a dark gray grout, leading the eye straight to the angles, creating a beautifully ambiguous pattern reminiscent of both Italian folk patterns and, if viewed slightly askew, Italian Futurist abstractions. The lighting also plays with dueling styles made whole; informally deployed schoolhouse pendants droop down from the hollow-cubed ceiling, dotting the entrance with a toned down classicism. In contrast, Roll + Hill’s retro globe bulb chandeliers cling together in a constellation-like form in the rear dining area. We envisioned Locanda as a comfortably Californian expression of Rome’s traditional family-run restaurants. We wanted its details to run modestly through the space so that one might enjoy it as a compliment with the food. Our mixture of smart functionality and revered tradition runs through the details of Locanda, unifying the overall design with purpose and history, creating a contemporary space that one can relax into and just enjoy the food.

Andrew Barnett, formerly of Ecco Caffe, approached envelope a+d to work on his espresso bar after getting to know the firm through his curatorial role in the Coffee Pavilion that we designed for Slow Food Nation. Barnett had located a scrappy space behind Duc Loi Supermarket in the Mission, and he teamed up with Anthony Myint of Mission Chinese Food to bring waffles and salads into the mix. envelope’s challenge was to fit the pedigree and ambition of Barnett and Myint, both forerunners in their fields, into 300 square feet and, on a budget to match. In order to clearly demarcate Barnett and Myint’s distinct concepts, we employed a material change at the diagonal seam that is created by the perpendicular walls. The food concept, constrained by health standards for kitchens, was kept cool and utilitarian through the use of stainless steel, white ceramic tile and concrete. The espresso bar, anchored by a leggy oak service platform, was warmed to match its offerings with a honey-hued oak plywood wall in a hexagonal pattern designed and fabricated in-house. A brick red steel window frame opens to the side street, creating a ledge for people to stand and lean as they look onto the hubbub of the Mission.

Our longstanding collaboration with John McNeil began with his creative studio’s offices in West Berkeley. A garage door in the workspace rolls up to let in the sun and breeze coming off the bay. The workspace peers into a large, airy kitchen that doubles as entertaining space for clients and colleagues. The design carries through the feeling of McNeil's family home, a renovated Victorian adjacent to the offices. Comfortable spaces for collaboration are outfitted with furniture and fabrics that defy the conventions of contemporary workplaces. The offices, home and studio annex together compose a distributed live-work complex nestled within Berkeley’s urban edge.

This headquarters for Durie Tangri, a law firm specializing in intellectual property, occupy the lower two floors of a turn-of-the-century mercantile building steps away from San Francisco’s iconic Transamerica Tower. envelope A+D transformed this historic structure with design a strategy rooted in the law firm’s mostly tech-related clients. The spatial aspect of office prioritize openness and transparency: providing visual access while allowing for aural privacy where required for client confidentiality. Architectural expressions of the building systems, including the heavy-timber structural frame, venting ducts, sprinklers and data cabling, are treated as a kind of information with varying degrees of legibility throughout the varied spaces composing the offices. On the main level, green rubber flooring defines more public meeting and reception spaces. On the upper floor, partner offices ring a central collaborative space defined by a “pool” of blue rubber. Collaborative spaces figure highly throughout the offices, supporting the firm’s need to actively collaborate in the crafting of new intellectual property laws in the territories of tech, web and biotechnology law. These flexible spaces promote casual group engagement through diverse postures from clustered seating focused on large white board walls to intimate couch-rooms to more traditional library-type work tables.

The cuisine of this infamous Mission District restaurant is elegant yet modest, based on the traditions of Tuscan cooking techniques but executed with a clarity of intent and a focus on the essence of the ingredients. The architecture reflects this sensibility using a rich pallet of wrapping Jarrah hardwoods for the floor, built-in seating and bar elements. The red wood creates a warm, tactile space in which a number of zinc tables are set under a field of custom floating lights. These elements form a stage for the performance of dining, where the participants are simultaneously spectacle and audience.

The Crane Court Residence began with a puzzle: how to resolve our client’s desire to have an inward-facing private courtyard house with the fact of a significantly sloping site with compelling outward facing views. The project solves the puzzle with a transformation of the courtyard house type, stepped to conform to the sloping site and with vertical surfaces opened to engage the interior living spaces with the experience of site. The result is a house that steps gracefully down the hillside with bedroom wings tucked under the primary living areas. The top surface of the lower bedroom volume creates an elevated rooftop terrace, protected on two sides and focused towards a distant view of the valley. The space of the living room focuses on a view of meadow on a prominent ridgeline, while the dining room and entry sequence nestles into the sheltered intimate undercanopy of a grove of existing Live Oaks. Designed for a glazier and his family, the house is designed with maximum transparency to the near and distant views of the site. The solid components of the envelope are either cast-in-place concrete, as it rises from the ground, or a wood veneered phenolic rainscreen, which define the primary volumes of the building. The roof, gutters and eave edges are formed copper sheeting. The siting of the house was done to nestle the house into clusters of existing trees. The landscape design preferences the native California hillscape of Live Oaks and tall grasses.

The design for Contigo links garden, dining, kitchen and street through a series of overlapping figures within a continuous spatial tube that runs from the front facade to the rear garden. The kitchen is located up front to forge an active link with the life of the street, with fresh local foods delivered directly into the kitchen during the day, in the evening the frenetic activity of the kitchen is placed in the foreground of the dining experience. Here, a stool seating bar along the warped entry ramp allows for a close engagement with the experience of the preparation of the food. The dining zone in the middle of the space is bracketed and embraced by the both kitchen and garden, with the kitchen refrigeration wall reaching back toward the garden and a captured verdant garden reaching toward the front entry. Dining is defined above by a playful lighting field of porcelain shades and below by a sinuous slatted oak bench and field of classic black Thonet chairs. The sandblasted concrete floor surface that runs from the street to the garden forms a continuous connecting surface. Two separate circulations paths - a gentle S-shaped ramp and a more direct stair and aisle path - creates a generous multi-directional circulation that threads its way through the dining room as it negotiates the level change between sidewalk and garden. The spatial tube that runs from the front to the back facades is a crisp white box, with material expression in the wood of the spatial saddle bags where redwood siding is re-used from the building’s original 100 year old building siding and the wood storefront of the front and rear facades. The garden design extends the space of the dining to a covered exterior, with a large urban garden planter for edible plantings. Throughout the design and construction of the restaurant an ethic of sustainability and durability permeated the design decisions. As restaurant environments are extremely intense and unforgiving, a concerted effort was made to use materials and methods that are environmentally friendly, beautiful and will thrive in the restaurant environment.