Welcome to The lookerA column about the design and style of San Francisco Standard Editor-AT-Large Erin Feher.
When Brett Terpeluk arrived in San Francisco, he didn't start. The young architect was sent to the city in 2004 to lead the design and construction of the Avant Garde renovation of the California Academy of Sciences in the Golden Gate Park.
“It was a kind of very expensive science experiment, but it worked,” said Tuppeluk, whose boss, the famous Italian architect Renzo Piano, had handed over to the States as emissary. Once here and once, when the animal was wrapped in this first top-class project four years later-Terpeluk read his own architectural practice and often worked with his wife, the landscape designer Monica Viarengo, which he had met during his decades in Genoa, Italy.
Fifteen years later it was Viarengo who brought Terpeluk to another typical San Francisco project – one with a rich local history and some thorny design challenges. A couple had bought a time capsule of a house from the 1970s in Noe Valley, which was designed by Albert Lanier, the husband of Ruth Asawa. They had hired Viarengo to design the landscape, but the structure itself turned out to be more difficult to combine with an architect.
The house was enthusiastic about 1,800 square meters and at first glance-the main room was all provocative corners and skylights, which created a constantly changing gallery with sunlight and shadow. A window wall framed a triple threat of a view: the skyline of the city center, the typical twin tips stacked with houses and the bay behind it. But the property showed his age: the kitchen and bathrooms were desolate and dated and the outer shingles and rafters rotted from years of exposure to the fog, which fell over the hill every afternoon. A overlap from dark inner wood – redwood, jaw, cedar and oak – was aesthetically aesthetically aesthetic, especially in the rooms on the lower levels where the ceilings fall and the windows were sparse.
When Viarengo recommended her husband for the job, the homeowners had already released two former architects, who wanted to leave them as too much of their own traces on the property. They were looking for a easier touch – someone who would honor the existing DNA of the property.
Terpeluk immediately got on with the owners. He felt a mixture of awe and protection when he visited the house for the first time. “It was immediately clear to me: we have to be really careful with this house,” recalled Terpeluk. “To avoid cannibalization, what is here, or change the incredible feeling that you have when you walk through the front door.”
This feeling could be attributed to Lanier, who designed a handful of houses in Noe Valley, including one nearby, which he shared with Asawa and her six children. The legendary living room of this house was determined as part of the current Ruth Asawa retrospective of the museum (in view until September 2) in the SFMOMA. Lanier died in 2008, just three years before this house landed on the market. It was listed north of one million dollars, and more than 20 offers were quickly stacked. Terpeluk is grateful that its customers are ahead. “You totally committed yourself for this old house and take care of it,” he said.
The design and construction process lasted about four years, in which Terpeluk acted as a surgeon and carefully large wall panels from raw-Sawn-Redwood borrowed-borrowed today and reinstated it and reinstalled them. “The customer and I really felt connected to this material, even though he darkened the room,” said Terpeluk. “It created this cocoon -like environment.”
While the team had committed to keeping many existing elements, it was also striving to reinterpret others. The original shawls were all replaced by modernized versions, and the dark oak floors were divided against lighter Douglas fir boards with tight black knots. Terpeluk chose the material for both its history – they were saved by pierpilings by Treasure Island – and how the black knots reflect the new Blacked steel railings, which line the open stairs that now connect the three levels of the house.
The most striking update, however, is the collection of kitchen cabinets with high gloss in cheeky pastels, the shadow and the shine that is reminiscent of a sweet handful of Jordan almond sweetness.
“The Rough Sawn Redwood had such a strong presence, I thought it was really nice to have something with a sharp contrast or a high shine to play away,” said Terpeluk. The architect knew that it was a high -risk procession to bring brave colors into the sacrosankt room, so he called an expert. The color consultant Beatrice Santiccioli was a girlfriend and Italian colleague with an instinct for the selection of perfect pallet threats of her time with Apple, she curated the general colors for the legendary iPod nano.
“She lives only in this chromatic world and has such a deep understanding of color,” said Terpelek, who gives the combination of pink, minty green and yellow that the kitchen never occurred. Despite the daring infusion of contemporary color, the main floor kept its spirit of the 1970s North California, a womb made of unfinished wood and sky.
The lower two floors that were carved onto the slope received a more dramatic revision. Terpeluk decided to free them from the heavy wood treatment and added additional square meter number (and higher blankets) by digging out under the house and taking over a dead room under an old deck. Where the lower two levels once felt like an unpleasant architectural subsequent thought, they now have the same signature connection to the outside area as show stopping on the main floor.
Santiccioli also survived her prismatic fairy dust into the stairs, over the kitchenette on the inside and outside in foggy blue and added a new bathroom to a splash of deep purple. The colors harmonized with flowers, fog and sky right outside. Each floor opens to its own thoughtful green spaces designed by Viarenengo. It is imagined that Lanier, a passionate gardener who was often dressed with the farmers' overalls, would be proud of the development of the house.
“There are times as an architect to be very brave and aggressive with interventions,” said Terpeluk. “And then there are times when you really have to step back and understand what kind of dialogue you want with the history and the DNA of the structure. This house is almost like a lively, breathing organism. And we wanted to keep it alive.”