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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Through a careful coordination of artworks embedded within the architecture, the design seeks to create a heightened level of engagement by blurring the line between normal living and art experience.

Designing Locanda required a reflection of the restaurant’s reinterpretation of Roman cuisine. In using polarized qualities like loud and quiet, light and dark, modern and ancient, ENVELOPE crafted a spatial organization that played with fusing different worlds into the experience of enjoying great 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.