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.

In 2005, a design savvy skateboard couple enlisted ENVELOPE to renovate 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 two uses: a surprisingly eclectic upstairs flat for living, and a more matter-of-fact lower level creative studio that opens up to the garden.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.