The house was originally a small two-bedroom house, raised above a garage and storage space – typical of the housing stock built in the middle of last century in San Francisco. This project consisted of creating a usable family room, wet bar, laundry and bathroom in this storage area and making it part of the main house by designing a stair that connected the two levels instead of acting as a buffer between them. The intervention on the main living level consisted of a full renovation of the kitchen and opening it up to the living and dining rooms. The kitchen was also opened up to the stair and expanded vertically by way of generous skylight shafts that take advantage of the sloped roof.
The big change was making the stair a generous, comfortable connector of the two levels. So often basement area remodels such as this turn out to be fine, but the solution leaves the two floors feeling isolated from one another. The resolution of the vertical circulation here makes the two floors feel like one house instead of disparate spaces.
Large skylights and canted skylight shafts enlarge the kitchen and stairwell vertically and flood them with natural light.
construction: completed by Golden West Construction
structural engineer: SEMCO Engineering
photographer: Open Homes Photography
architect / design team: Phil Rossington, Alice Roche
Awards and Publications:
- Real Kitchens magazine, April 2012, p68-69
