Location:San Francisco, California, US
Architects: Joseph Esherick Architect | Edmonds + Lee Architects
Photography: Joe Fletcher
When the new owners of the this home that was originally designed by famed Bay Area mid-century architect Joseph Esherick approached Edmonds + Lee to help them renovate the historically-loaded project, the architects felt a sense of deference without obligation, and an enthusiasm for taking on this modestly-sized but historically important house, and giving spatial clarification to their clients’ visions of openness, joy, light, and exploration.
Edmonds + Lee didn’t enlarge the house’s footprint or square footage, but they did rework the interior plans and spatial sequences in order to design ways to structurally and architecturally give a sense of containment to the newly-expanded interior spaces, brightly-colored pops of paintings and vases, and the expressive maximalism the clients naturally gravitated towards.
The house itself is a flip plan, with living space on the top floor and bedrooms and a family room on the lower floor, with an entrance that leads right towards a grand staircase that became the central organizing element around which Edmonds + Lee began to operate, keeping it as a spatial cue but removing busy details like posts and guard rails and transforming it into a floating cantilevered structure that brought light into the lower rooms and a sense of logic to the interior space.
Edmonds + Lee Architects
All images courtesy of Edmonds + Lee Architects
Edmonds + Lee Architects
Edmonds + Lee Architects is a full-service design, development, and architecture firm based in San Francisco’s Mission District. Partners Robert Edmonds and Vivian Lee—who met at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning—integrate a profoundly philosophical approach with a deep well of on-the-ground building experience to produce work that explores light, space, plane, material, and the endless possibilities of form.
Their work is ethereal and material, equally grounded in real-world concerns like budget and local rental markets as in conceptual concerns like duality, the power of a flush of recognition, and intimacy. The ability to work simultaneously on projects ranging from the ultra-intimate scale of a bedroom closet to the necessarily universal appeal of a large-scale multi-family building has produced a design approach equally tethered to precision and abstraction.
Edmonds + Lee Architects are as versed in ideas as they are in the vagaries of sunlight, as confident picking the perfect floorboards as they are in discussing the historical implications of the ideal stair detail, as comfortable with the expansive scale of the urban fabric as they are with the bottomless uniqueness of each client. They have explored the limitations of the urban grid and the possibilities of rural expansiveness, all with the same intense focus on client collaboration, material sensitivity, and spatial thoughtfulness. Every project explores the relationship between continuity and interruption, between seamlessness and breaks.
Every building is its own adventure, one that emerges with a story formed in deep collaboration with clients, contractors, interior designers, and landscape architects. Edmonds + Lee is deeply embedded in and familiar with the complex worlds of real estate, art, development, codes, and practice.
For the last ten years, Edmonds + Lee Architects has provided groundbreaking and consistent work for a number of clients; the partners have been formally recognized by the Monterey Design Conference; New Practices San Francisco; Architizer; and Arkitektura Assembly.
CONTACT
Edmonds + Lee Architects
2601 Mission Street, Suite 503
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 285-1300
info@edmondslee.com
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