Project Stories

A renovation and a series of small additions gave a Mill Valley hillside house the connection to its site and southern views that it never had. The project was a Platinum Winner in the 2026 Design Skill Awards.

A turn-of-the-century Castro bungalow had lost its character to decades of additions. The renovation kept the footprint, reorganized the interior and gave the exterior one controlled palette.

A mid-century house by John Bolles on San Francisco's highest residential street: the kitchen opened, the deck reconnected, and a Japanese-inspired interior with a tatami room and soaking tubs.

A Sausalito hillside home modernized and enlarged: the kitchen opened to the view, the lower floor more than doubled by digging into the hill, and a failed exterior stair replaced.

A new single-story house in Mountain View wraps a courtyard around a leaning Australian tea tree, with clerestory light and display walls for the owner's art collection.

An oddly planned apartment in an 1860s brick warehouse in downtown San Francisco was stripped to the studs and reorganized, with a private rooftop garden covering its whole footprint.

In a 1960s house in the Mill Valley hills, an enclosed deck had cut the kitchen off from the view. It became the dining room, and the kitchen was redesigned around an efficient work triangle, with a large island as the gathering place.

A Sears home from the early 20th century, on a Mill Valley hillside, had grown by piecemeal additions. A front addition, a new stair and a reorganized plan gave it coherence, after demolition revealed framing that could not be kept.

A San Francisco family stayed in the house they loved by digging out the ground floor and extending to the rear: two bedrooms became four, and the street facade was preserved.

An early-20th-century San Francisco house with a Mackintosh-inspired front kept its street presence while the rear was rebuilt, a guest suite was dug into the hillside and the kitchen opened to the garden.

An eight-foot addition, a new shed roof and a few removed walls turned a compartmentalized 1960s builder house in San Carlos into an open home built around its kitchen.

A 400-square-foot addition toward the street gave a 1950s house in the Mill Valley flats a lounge, an office, a bathroom, an entry hall and a new face, under one simple shed roof.