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.

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

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. 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.

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.