Journal

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.