When a Stanford University professor, a design thinking pioneer, sought to remodel one of the university’s modest faculty homes, it was inevitable that the process—a deeply personal collaboration—and the project would be unlike any other.
In reworking the compartmentalized floor plan of the original 1970’s home, the team sought to distill the design to experiences central to day-to-day life—workshop, living area, and bedroom. From the street, the house is curiously simple at first glance: a stealth ranch-style home, paired back to the essential lines of its suburban vernacular, and painted shadow grey. New features are expressed as subtly disorienting counterpoints—a large, concealed pivoting front door, a curved protrusion screening a bedroom patio, and an abstracted “barn” workshop addition.
Staying within the existing footprint, the design simplifies and opens up the interiors: A bedroom blends into a kitchen, which blends into living rooms both inside and out. Minimal details and neutral finishes anticipate an evolving composition of the client’s art and design collection, including custom pieces by Ettore Sottsass. The courtyard, once closed off from the house, is now its undisputed heart.
The home’s open and connected spaces ultimately flow to the client’s workshop, a new separate structure dedicated to unbounded exploration. The shop’s industrial frame, wrapped in wood and glass, offers a clever reply to local pitched-roof mandates, while also providing a raw and tough space that is ready for anything.
Sliding glass doors and operable windows provide cooling cross ventilation for the house and studio. The workshop and courtyard are unconditioned spaces, expanding usable areas without increasing energy consumption. In the house, new sculptural voids with skylights enhance daylight and sightlines without introducing excessive heat gain. Living spaces extend to the courtyard-living room, where a custom UV-rated canopy can be pulled to float over the space for cooling shade. At the studio, indirect light from north-facing clerestory windows recreates the classic painters studio and provides an atmosphere for introspection and creativity. Throughout the design, the team also sought opportunities of re-use such as retaining the house’s structure, integrating modern detailing into the original T1-11 plywood siding, and selecting wood flooring made of piers salvaged from San Francisco’s old Transbay Terminal.
Rethinking the traditional front yard, the new landscape presents an imaginary world composed of drought-tolerant plantings and permeable areas of gravel. Cacti, understory grasses, native trees and hedges screen the private and public realms of this prominent corner lot. Celebrating color, seasonality, and the passage of time, muhly grasses cast a field of pink over the landscape in the fall. The landscape design resides in playful dialogue with the home, and is a gift to the neighborhood as well as local fauna.