I haven’t posted about this project in a while. I started working on this project in December of 2014. It is a fairly simply 240 square foot extension to a 1950’s ranch house located in San Bruno. We were required to jump through some bureaucratic, and expensive hoops to allow […]
For those who are thinking about remodeling or adding on, there is a bewildering amount of things you need to think about: the problem you are trying to solve, Planning codes, construction costs, and those are the things you can think of! My Project Planning Checklist is a checklist that […]
The project to legalize an in-law unit in San Francisco is complete! (Or at least, near enough to complete.) This project was to take an existing “unpermitted” in-law unit in a house in San Francisco, and, within the City’s legalization program, make the changes required to legalize the unit. The […]
My favorite house in San Francisco, at least from the outside, is a small single story house built in the classical style. It is a small cottage, built as a classical temple. It is dwarfed by the neighboring buildings which were built years after it was built. I suspect that […]
For something different – a TED talk by Roman Mars, about the design of city flags. (Just skip the ad that’s attached at the start.) Not only is this talk interesting, entertaining, and informative, it is also a great talk about design. Talking about design is hard to do. Roman […]
The project to legalize an existing secondary dwelling at the garage level of a house in San Francisco is getting closer to be completed. The permit was issued in May. So we are three months into construction and it’s starting to look pretty good. This project is being built as […]
San Francisco has a program, the purpose of which is to encourage landlords to improve the earthquake safety of their properties. If a landlord voluntarily performs a seismic upgrade to a building meeting certain specific criteria, the City allows the landlord to add one or more rental units to the […]
The other day my client for the project in San Leandro texted me a photograph. It made me smile. This is the view from the back hall through the kitchen through the new opening between the kitchen and dining room, through the dining room to the window and out to […]
The project to update a long neglected mid-century modern house in the Oakland hills is coming along. At what feels like a snail’s pace, but moving along none the less. In this post we’ll look at a nearly completed bathroom, a detail that makes my eye twitch, and a little […]
One of the projects in the office at the moment is the remodel of mid-century house in the Oakland hills. I have written about this project before here and here. The construction is moving along. Here are some photographs of the construction in progress. The Master Bedroom is small, but […]
A couple of weeks ago I visited the project in San Leandro which is currently under construction. I took some pictures and realized that this project provides an example of a principal of design I call “Small Changes Can Make A Big Difference”. In this case, opening up the wall between […]
Each architect find’s inspiration in different places and from different things. Sometimes that inspiration is easy to spot. Take, for instance, this bank building in Grass Valley, California. It looks very much a civic building to our North American eyes. It’s got the columns and the dome. It has to […]
Continuing my occasional series of posts about buildings that inspire me: The Wimbledon House was designed by the English architect Richard Rogers with his then wife, Su Rogers, for his parents. Design started in 1967 and was completed in 1969. It is located just outside of London. Considered by many […]
Oh, heavenly day! We got the permit! Pardon me while I dance a little jig in celebration. You see, this is a small San Francisco project legalizing an existing secondary dwelling. We are doing this through a special program San Francisco offers, which allows owners of houses with unpermitted second […]
Today I visited my Oakland remodel project. The owner and I met with the contractor to discuss tile details – where grout joints will be, alignments, and so on. The owner and I also discussed the paint colors for the remodeled Master Suite and came to some decisions. This above […]
This post is about a bathroom remodeling which is part of a larger remodeling project to a mid-century house in the Oakland Hills. The bathroom has a good size, but the fixtures are arranged in a strange way and date to the late 1940’s – and not in a good […]
I recently accompanied my partner to Manila to attend to some family business. While we were there, we jumped on a plane and flew to Singapore to visit some friends. In addition to catching up and eating our way through the city (the food there is amazing), we also did […]
I recently saw a horrifying article pop up on my FaceBook feed. It was a news story from Southern California about the largest case of engineering fraud in the history of the state. In summary, two guys had been holding themselves out as engineers. Using a combination of pirated software […]
Every project has it’s own challenges. Sometimes it is the siting. Sometimes it is the budget. Sometimes it is a tricky space planning problem. This project, currently in the office, is to add a new Secondary Dwelling Unit to a single family house in Danville. The challenge on this project […]
This is an experiment. I have a project in San Francisco and the client was having trouble visualizing what the skylights were going to look like. Instead of making static drawings of the space, I thought I would use the 3-D capabilities of Chief Architect and make a quick video […]