For a 1930s Spanish Revival home in the Marina neighborhood of San Francisco—once a landfill—Spiegel Aihara Workshop (Noticed) worked from the ground up. Initially, the staff excavated various feet of contaminated soil (very likely from an early 20th century gas plant that at the time operated there). Nevertheless tough, this gave them an possibility to modernize the home’s foundation and redistribute load bearing partitions throughout.
“Rather than basically setting up on the new floor, we saw the challenge as redistributing the floor vertically across the site, during the developing,” says Dan Spiegel, architect and founding husband or wife of Saw. “While quite a few properties have terraces, or balconies, or matters like that, we set out to sustain a finish continuity of a new floor throughout the full dwelling, making sure that every single roof was not so a lot the top rated of a little something, but the base of something—a new floor.”
The property’s much more hard factors also fueled artistic pondering. “We actually like constraints—they direct to surprising answers,” suggests Megumi Aihara, Saw founding partner and landscape architect who recognized that the new structure made available an prospect for the back again back garden to be skilled from various concentrations. To create a stately backdrop, the staff handpicked Oct Glory Pink maple trees, recognized for their dramatic fall foliage.
For the interiors, accomplished by Heidi Kim of White Area Structure, the Spanish Revival design of the authentic property encouraged the use of resourceful geometry. “The curvy kinds were motivated by Streamline Moderne/Art Deco architecture in the Marina community, and the curved archways and doorways of the authentic 1931 Spanish Revival house,” shares Spiegel.
Sinuous surfaces blur the separation in between rooms, encouraging fluid motion. The house’s nickname, “Wraparound,” will come from the notion that subtle variants in corner geometry effect directional movement, identical to how the shape of a hockey rink influences manage of the puck.
“It’s all a approach of translation throughout eras, wanting for a little something suited to the current second by adapting a number of languages of the past history of the dwelling,” provides Spiegel. With loaded textures, delicate curves, and an magnificence befitting its heritage, the resulting space grounds in a lot more ways than one particular, presenting a tranquil respite for the relatives of five to connect with property.
