Set on a rare, large vacant site in the Hollywood Hills, this 3,750-square-foot house is conceived as a series of experiential “chambers,” rooms and outdoor spaces, each designed to heighten their spatial, material and chromatic elements.

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.

An exploration of public space, Park Tower is a dynamic lighting installation attuned to daily rhythms, its program and connections ebb and flow, day to night, weekday to weekend, through a variety of modular interventions and lighting engagements.

To celebrate a decade of activation at NOW Hunters Point, ENVELOPE and Studio O partnered with Kristin Damrow & Company to create a site-specific, community-driven dance performance and art installation called Intentional Shift.

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

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.

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.

NOW Hunters Point takes the practice of urban activation and applies it as an iterative, community-led visioning process to the Pacific Gas and Electric Hunters Point site. In the 10 years that NOW Hunters Point had been operational, it hosted over 216 activations (from job training to movie nights, to even a circus) and engaged with over 30,000 visitors.

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.

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.

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, in Berkeley, California. Limited production run. Please email info@envelopead.com for pricing and general inquiries. Local pick up required.

ENVELOPE 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.

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

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.