The four-story, 4,000-square-foot building on a steep up-sloping hillside had four bedrooms, a media room, several bathrooms, a panoramic view of the city and bay, and easy access to Silicon Valley. But its unfinished backyard, gray stucco exterior, gray-stained oak floors, walnut casework and hemmed-in hallways were all unremarkable.
To put his stamp on what is the very first home he has called his own, the young owner enlisted the help of Akemi Tamaribuchi Reed, his former hairstylist, who is now his design touchstone.
“My role is very atypical,” Reed, who heads a lifestyle consultancy firm called Subject to Change, explains.
Working alongside each other, both teams dovetailed their design expertise to craft a seamless indoor/outdoor living space.
John Steuernagel, who grew up in New Jersey with a father in the flower nursery business, started Sculpt in 2003. Many unique gardens ensued, including one for a blind man, but access-wise, none as challenging as the one in Glen Park.
The Sculpt team easily added a koi pond and a heated Helios bench by Galanter & Jones in an existing open-to-sky grotto with a waterfall fountain off a rear guest room on the third floor.
CCS, led by project architect Bjorn Steudte, later transformed the shed into a sculptural 10-by-10-foot mirrored cube, with a cylindrical interior that contains an oculus inspired by artist James Turrell’s Skyspaces.
Midway up the garden, an old apple tree was heavily pruned and saved, and plantings such as palms, leafy tropical philodendrons, Colocasia “elephant ears” and creeping leucadendron ground cover were added. At the very top, a green wall with Soleirolia soleirolii, or baby’s tears, combined with dwarf geraniums came from Flora Grubb nursery.
Inside the house, “My client was still trying to define his style,” Reed adds. However, as an MIT dropout who came to the Bay Area to start a tech company, he is partial to modernism and rejected the house’s decorative hardware and other flourishes.
With CCS, Reed eliminated those and added a wealth of new materials. “I knew that the owner wanted to live in a space that did not feel plastic,” she explains.
So the building now has distinctive charred-cedar shou-suji-ban Japanese-style matte-black siding, with stainless-steel edging around the Fleetwood aluminum windows. A tall, skinny entry porch is lined with bright back-painted red Oikos glass. A new 8-foot-high steel front door with electronic hardware pivots opens to reveal a well-lit foyer that is designed as an art gallery; currently, a Matthew Palladino cast-plaster work called “Still Life With Fruit” is showcased there; on the second floor, under the staircase, a found-wood-and-metal piece by Kirk Stoller incorporates old bike handlebars.
“Victorians took stairs seriously and so did we,” Smith says. “We made a showy steel staircase encased in bleached Douglas fir treads and risers by First Last & Always.” Wood cladding also reappears in the top section of the stairwell’s north parti-wall.
Similar materials unify the foyer and rooms on three floors above it: bleached recycled Scandinavian Douglas fir plank flooring from Dinesen meets white painted walls with flush baseboards. Standard door openings were made floor-to-ceiling, and stairwell and hallway walls have openings cut into them “for a more open feeling,” Smith says.
On the second floor, the walls and ceiling of the media room are covered with blackboard paint and livened with Mah Jong sofas from Roche Bobois upholstered with brightly colored Missoni fabric. Sarah Morris wallpaper from Maharam in the powder room off a marble-backed bar niche echoes a similar pop sensibility, which recurs in several other bathrooms that are lined with mirrors or showy marble. For instance, a bathroom on the same floor in the guest suite facing the street has walls covered with custom black-and-white Bizazza mosaic tiles, installed in a pixelated pattern inspired by a chain link fence.
On the third floor, the owner’s office, located in the rear guest room, has an Oslo sofa and 70/70 desk from Muuto and on the wall, Matthew Palladino’s “Night Ride”; outside, in the rock-walled courtyard with artificial turf, are colorful Adagio swings by Paola Lenti from Dzine.
Down the hallway, a small nursery was converted into a music room. Its closet was eviscerated to form a cubby, upholstered with green Maharam fabric, where the owner likes to play his guitars. For better acoustics and privacy, Reed asked for built-in pelmets to install drapes.
At the top of the last flight of stairs, Smith added a boxy MDF railing cap, which also provides a display surface in the spare, open-plan living space that has no dividing walls and opens easily to the outside. “You understand the house better up here,” Smith says.
The dining area in the center of the open-plan living space is simply defined by a rectangular mirror-finish stainless-steel panel installed in the ceiling, aligned with a row of existing skylights. “Blue/Green Vertical,” a diptych by Joey Piziali, is paired with a Mobile 8 pendant light by Michael Anastassiasides.
Next to it, the taut modern, all-white kitchen has an island of Carrara marble and oxidized cherry bar stools by Sawkille Co. Artwork in this space includes a framed lithograph by Christoph Rossner from the San Francisco–based Romer Young Gallery on the kitchen counter.
The dramatic cube was intended as a viewing outpost at first but is now used as a retreat for inward reflection. Its entrance is cleverly concealed in back and the cylindrical interior has another voluptuous heated bench to sink into and watch passing clouds through an oculus overhead. Acoustical felt on the ceiling absorbs any ambient sounds, and in that silence any passing thought can be scribbled on the fiberglass walls that are covered with whiteboard paint.
“The owner wanted to create a playful space where ideas could be shared,” Smith says. “We gave him exactly that.”
Zahid Sardar brings an extensive range of design interests and keen knowledge of Bay Area design culture to SPACES magazine. He is a San Francisco editor, curator and author specializing in global architecture, interiors, landscape and industrial design. His work has appeared in numerous design publications as well as the San Francisco Chronicle for which he served as an influential design editor for 22 years. Sardar serves on the San Francisco Decorator Showcase design advisory board.