LAKE envisions a thriving urban promenade filled with Black-owned and Black-centered businesses occupying flexible indoor and outdoor spaces that support gathering, shopping, experiencing, and celebrating Oakland’s vibrant community and culture.

For The Social Network we designed an open and lively 28,000 square foot cafeteria that can accommodate up to 3,500 employees and guests for any given meal. The cafeteria doubles as a secure auditorium for weekly "all hands" presentations and global simulcasts. Independent from the main cafeteria, we designed the campus's burger shack and pizza restaurant, adding to the neighborhood feel of The Social Network grounds and complementing the playfulness and casual work environment.

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.

Part of the office campus dubbed "The Farm", the Coffee and Juice Kiosks offer employees and visitors alike a chance to gather and unwind in two unique, vibrant settings.

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.

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.

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

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.

For this first Pizzeria Delfina location outside of San Francisco, we devised a nuanced strategy that allowed the qualities unique to the original pizzerias to flourish — an intimacy between patron and cook, an open kitchen that serves to energize and entertain the dining area, and a heightened level of service — while featuring a Sirron Norris mural above the main dining area, and adding a sizable patio to cater to Burlingame's warmer climate and strong outdoor dining culture.

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.

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 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.