Translucence

The design brings clarity and openness to the home by taking an almost surgical approach, retaining essential structural elements while introducing new features.

The double-wide lot sits atop a bluff and next to a community garden, making for a rare condition in the heart of the city: a large, secluded site, overlooking the city and the bay.

A series of interventions break apart the existing box, rewriting the relationships and connections between rooms.

Glass and natural light both diffuse and hold together the composition, defining scenes throughout the house that explore perceptions of inside/outside, private/public, and light/dark as well as materiality.

The most visible intervention is the insertion of an all-glass pavilion enclosing a dining and family room. Neither completely indoors nor outdoors, this volume reaches into the rear yard to engage sweeping views of the bay and East Bay hills beyond.

Trellis of aluminum and wood shade the space without encumbering the sense of expansiveness.

A brown-glass stair and bridge float within this space connecting levels and rooms, and adding a dimension of light and color. The brown glass, which evokes the modern-era origins of the home, shifts from solid to transparent with the changing light each day.

The upper floor is expanded and refined. The master suite is reimagined as a singular, light-filled volume extending the full depth of the floor to the outdoors.

A curved glass shower pushes beyond the envelope of the house and into the screened front balcony—a secretly provocative gesture to the street below.

In this space in particular the play of privacy and views, light and shadow, recall California’s Light and Space art movement to which the design pays homage.

Throughout the house curved forms and playful elements—including a child’s fire pole connecting the two floors—counter the home’s rectilinear form.

Finally, a front facade composed vertical and horizontal wood boards and slats, echoes the trellises and partitions, tying together the home’s public and private expressions and replacing an opaque street presence with a wood screen activated by shifting light from day to night.