The Cuernavaca Residence is the latest installment in an evolving constructed landscape on a two-acre family compound that is shared by the client and her sister. Nestled in a wooded lot, the home forms an ensemble with an existing pool house. The latter’s board-formed concrete walls establish the material basis for the new residence, which is home to a family of five and includes two home offices. The house features a restrained vocabulary of rift sawn oak, mill finished steel, galvanized metal panels, and concrete—that alternates in orientation and pattern. Taken together, these materials create an environment rich in texture and animated by sun and shade over the course of a day.
The house slips between the existing pool house and a magnificent live oak, defining discrete terrains on the property. Long views are established: east to the limestone shelf of the Colorado River; north to a rolling meadow; west to a grove of oaks and the shared pool house. A double-height porch, with an outdoor fireplace, provides an outdoor family room; a second-floor roof deck affords constant breezes and stunning views to the limestone cliffs. Aligned with these natural features, the house welcomes engagement with circumstances of this particular landscape as the owners move through their home; further, the house provides a sense of the entire property in incidental moments.
Alterstudio Architecture, LLP of Austin, Texas is a full service architecture and design firm known for its intellect in design, inventiveness, craftsmanship, and details. The work is rooted in deep-seated virtues of architecture – generous space making, shrewd manipulation of day-lighting, and meticulous attention to detail. The heightening of direct human experience and the framing of the complex circumstances of their situations are at the core of each project. more
CONTACT
Alterstudio Architecture
Cambridge Tower
1801 Lavaca Street Suite #106
Austin, Texas 78701
A tight lot in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood seems an unlikely setting for a home replete with gardens. Rather than a conventional yard, Jensen Architects sculpted a weave of shifting volumes and open spaces. At every turn, living spaces blend with dramatic views and intimate courtyards and terraces. Family life flows effortlessly inside and outside throughout the day, “like walking in the clouds,” they say.
Movement through the house reveals a thoughtful narrative of the space, materials, and people that weave through it. Simply walking through the house creates a new relationship to the city topography and bay views beyond. The stairs are treated as sculptural elements emphasizing the fluidity between the levels and the views revealed at each landing. A glass elevator allows you to experience this change as you ascend vertically through the house. The steel-frame of the elevator is painted International Orange, the same color specification as the Golden Gate Bridge. This echo of the iconic structure seen in the distance serves to deepen the house’s ties to its spectacular location.
In many ways the design involved solving a three-dimensional puzzle, a push and pull between height limits, open space requirements, neighbor considerations, and the family’s desire for openness and views. Jensen threaded open spaces throughout the house and shifted living spaces to maintain light and views for neighbors. Carefully placed cut-outs over the pool and courtyard open up vertical views through the house. All outdoor levels are connected as well, with exterior staircases from the rooftop garden to the street.
Jensen balanced the vocabulary of transparency and interconnectedness with the realistic considerations of privacy and solar heat gain. The shifting volumes create south facing overhangs for shading, and each glass wall has curtains or pocketing shades. Floor-to-ceiling aluminum louvers obscure side views to and from neighboring homes, while allowing for light and direct views. Excavation into the hillside created private living areas on the lowest level and the entry hallway spaces can be partitioned at will with sliding solid pocket doors.
As the founder of Jensen Architects, Mark Jensen cultivated his view of the art and science of architecture into an award-winning design practice based in San Francisco. These values came naturally to Mark, who grew up among artisans and designers, and deepened through his academic and early experience in the United States and Italy. After earning a Bachelor of Architecture at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, a program recognized for its emphasis on building science, he worked with renowned architects Superstudio, Jim Jennings and Mark Mack, as well as noted fashion designer Enrico Coveri. An active member of the San Francisco Bay Area arts and design community, Mark is a former chair of the California College of the Arts (CCA) Interior Architecture Department and the Headlands Center for the Arts Board of Trustees. He is a licensed architect in California. Mark was elevated to The College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 2018.
Two modest volumes, benched gently into the hillside, open to a floating glass bar just as the ground drops away. This perch at the edge of a pine forest allows for a layered sequence of heightened sensorial experience, moving from grounded enclosure to revelation and suspension over the valley floor.
The design appropriates outdoor space, using screened openings, operable glass walls, and generously shaded decks to create a gradual transition from the wild natural landscape to a materially warm interior. Spaces are arranged to enable the convivial spirit of a wine country gathering, while providing moments of solitude akin to being in a tree house.
Founded in 2001 by Architect and Principal Darren Petrucci, Architecture – Infrastructure – Research, Inc. is an architecture and urban design firm focused on translating advanced research methods and sustainable practices into elegant design solutions that respond to each client’s particular needs and desires. The firm sees the complex contemporary environmental context of each site as an opportunity for investigation and unique solutions. Trained as both an architect and urban designer at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Darren is a Professor in The Design School at Arizona State University, and a Senior Sustainability Scientist in the Global institute of Sustainability, as well as an affiliate faculty in The School of the Future of Innovation in Society. This unique background and expertise in architecture, urban design, the science of sustainability, technology, and materials informs the design practice of A-I-R, Inc. producing cutting-edge, intelligent, and beautiful designs for its clients. A-I-R, Inc. seeks intelligent and enlightened forward-thinking clients who are interested in a collaborative environment that focuses on design solutions that engage individual sites, specific client programs, and environmental conditions.
Built on a breathtaking location in the hills of Los Angeles, this 1940’s ranch style house originally was a warren of small rooms. Bestor Architecture re-imagined and reorganized the house, transforming the cramped configuration into an open plan space with indoor-outdoor flow. The new layout connects the main living areas and master bedroom to the back yard, which has views to the distant mountains.
The client’s main wish was to have a kitchen that functioned as the heart of the main living area. Everything was opened up and connections were made with oversized glass windows in the front and back. The central fireplace was removed and the kitchen and living spaces were reconfigured as one shared space. All cabinetry was custom designed by Bestor Architecture.
Bestor Architecture is based in Los Angeles and was founded by Barbara Bestor, FAIA in 1995. Bestor Architecture has designed a number of award-winning projects including headquarters for Beats by Dre and Nasty Gal, Blackbirds, a groundbreaking new typology for dense housing in Echo Park, and a variety of experimental residences and commercial establishments. The varied, creative, and aesthetically progressive body of work expands the territory of architecture into atmospheric urbanism.
CONTACT
Bestor Architecture
2030 Hyperion Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90027
On a large, flat property with a lawn that stretches to a fruit orchard the clients discovered ramshackle structures (a three-bedroom house with a few loosely connected guest cottages) in need of repair. Their goal, rather than tear down the buildings, was to unite and logically connect what had become a hodgepodge of nondescript buildings.
The owners, who had known architect Barbara Bestor, for years worked on a plan that would renovate all the buildings but in a cohesive, beach style. Barbara would do all the architecture, and the owner oversaw the interiors, collaborating closely with her team. The main house was formerly closed off and had small rooms. It did not connect to the outside. Barbara’s solution was to raise the middle portion of the house, creating an entirely new great room, with radiant flooring, that opened up completely to the terrace and lawn. She then inverted the standard gabled roof, creating a butterfly shape that brings in natural light and air.
The indoor-outdoor living concept is embraced and enhanced by the addition of skylights and clerestory windows and bringing the exterior walls’ board-and-batten treatment inside. The same upholstery fabrics were used for indoor built-ins and outdoor cushions. All custom cabinetry was designed by Bestor Architecture.
Barbara Bestor, FAIA is founding principal of Bestor Architecture. Since 1995, Bestor Architecture has actively redefined Los Angeles architecture with a practice that rigorously engages the city through design, art, and urbanism. Increasingly, the firm applies L.A.’s lessons to national undertakings. She explores the architectural form through experiments in spatial arrangements, graphics, and color, which is evident in her projects from custom residences to headquarters for international companies. Her varied and progressive body of work connects with people on many levels, often outside the boundaries traditionally delineated for architecture. She believes that good design creates an engaged urban life and embraces the ‘strange beauty’ that enhances everyday life experience.
Barbara’s career is punctuated with inventive projects in a wide breadth of typologies. She has designed new ways of creating accessible urbanism in her “stealthy density” Blackbirds housing, groundbreaking retail and restaurant flagships, dynamic workspaces for Beats By Dre and Snap, award-winning experimental residences and pioneering arts projects that are deeply rooted in their communities and cultural context.
While maintaining a practice, Barbara has continuously taught at Southern California’s leading design schools from SCI-Arc to Woodbury University, where she is currently the executive director of the Julius Shulman Institute. She received her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, studied at the Architecture Association in London and received a MARCH at SCI-Arc. She is the author of Bohemian Modern, Living in Silver Lake.
CONTACT
Bestor Architecture
2030 Hyperion Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Two art collectors and dealers specializing in contemporary art and art of the American West decided to move from the arid high desert on the outskirts of Reno into the city. They desired a house that would both reflect the contemporary moment and be explicitly of the West.
The new site, located on a bluff in an established neighborhood, gazes off at the desert mountains in the distance, but otherwise offered little inspiration. Like Reno itself and most desert cities, the subdivision ignores its regional context and associates instead with a generic, placeless idea of mainstream America. We joined the site in gazing off at the mountains and decided to confront the desert as a real environment as well as its ambivalent role in the cultural imaginary.
The American desert has a history of being understood as a place of lack, emptiness, or otherness. Framed as a barren wasteland, a kind of ‘no place’, the desert has been appointed the perfect test site, a place for all genres of experimentation – military, scientific, and social. The desert is rarely seen for itself, instead acting as a mirror for various projected fantasies: wilderness, frontier, and heterotopia. Enduringly mercurial, it is a sandbox that changes forms to fit the imaginations of the user, a space of ambivalence and uncertainty.
In our case, the flat, empty lot became a test site to reinstate the ecology of the Great Basin Desert into the generic sprawl of Reno. The desert shapes the project both as a specific environment and as an idea. We see the return of the desert as the return of the repressed, a resilient ground that drifts and surges to form both landscape and shelter. Invoking the desert as a shapeshifter par excellence, the project began by treating the ground as a fluid material that allows different forms to emerge, then flicker or dissolve into other forms.
SHAPESHIFTER explores slippery form by seeing the ground as a mutable, protean material, an untapped unconscious. We reshaped the site into anticlines and synclines, dunes and blowouts, and gradually the form of the house emerged with the terrain. Then we hardened the form into a regular mesh composed of planar faces. Every edge is entirely shared: no edges terminate in the middle of another edge. This results in a flow of space that supports extreme difference without discontinuities. Elements of the house slide into each other with shifting relationships of fractured symmetries, local axes, and embedded parallelisms. Topologically, the house is spatially slippery, a twisted torus with several secondary and tertiary bubbles of space.
Native plant species populate the site, but at the edges of the property give way to the neighborhood plant vernacular. The desert reasserts itself within the city – maybe it will spread. Historically, landscape form has been allowed to be more relaxed than architecture, but in this case landscape informs the architecture to the point that the two are inextricable: another desert mirage.
OPA is an idea-driven office committed to finding design solutions that both expand the possibilities inherent in architecture and resonate within their particular context. While every project originates as a response to specific requirements of site, program and client, each evolves as an exploration of its own internal potential rather than reflecting a predetermined style. In all the work, there is an emphasis on communicating architectural meaning by creating powerful emotional and perceptual resonances. Shaping and choreographing spatial experiences through the consideration of movement and formal logic results in work that is distinctive for its conceptual clarity and physical presence. more
Klopf Architecture, Arterra Landscape Architects and Henry Calvert of Calvert Ventures Designed and built a new warm, modern, Eichler-inspired, open, indoor-outdoor home on a deeper-than-usual San Mateo Highlands property where an original Eichler house had burned to the ground.
John Klopf is a licensed architect over 24 years in the field. He is the Founding Principal of Klopf Architecture, which he founded in 2001 after working for a few years at other firms. John, along with his wife and their two sons, lives in San Francisco and enjoys walking his dogs to work or biking to work whenever possible.
John was born in Cleveland Ohio, and is a graduate of both Harvard (Bachelor, 1993) and Berkeley (Master of Architecture, 2000). While at Berkeley, he won the highly competitive Branner travel fellowship for nine months of fully-paid independent architectural study in Japan, Europe, and Scandinavia. While at Harvard he studied abroad for one semester in Nanjing, China.
In addition to practicing architecture, John has taught design at USF (the University of San Francisco) as an adjunct professor, taught introductory design classes at Berkeley as a lecturer and graduate student instructor, and managed a major sustainability research project for the architecture department at Berkeley.
Today architectural practice consumes all of John’s professional time. He focuses on modernist homes, green and net-zero energy homes, and mid-century modern buildings. He is excited about the completion of Klopf Architecture’s first net-zero energy modern house and looks forward to working on more modern zero-net energy houses.
A lot of design projects start with problem-solving, and this pool house, on Long Island’s East End, was no exception. Building codes in the Hamptons specify that a pool house can only contain 200 square feet of interior space. Here, the interior section — maxing out at exactly 200 square feet, and enclosable by folding doors — was carefully crafted to maximize the space: it contains a kitchenette, bathroom, day bed and chair. A trellised area, designed for lounging and relaxing, connects it to a garage, where this family keeps all their beach-going essentials, from surfboards to Jeeps. Natural elements, from marble to bluestone to wisteria vines, connect the space to its environment.
The design team of Robert Young Architects practices an architecture of pragmatic response. Creative exploration and thorough investigation of the essential facts and distinctive possibilities of each site and client’s needs lead to organic, apt, and inevitable solutions that are true to their time and place.
Whether architecture, interior, furniture, object, or landscape, the firm guides every project from conception to completion with passion and commitment. Each design decision integrates aesthetic and contextual imperatives with those of budget, program, materials, technology, and construction techniques.
Robert Young’s mission is to create compelling, practical and original architecture for informed clients who care deeply about the spaces where they live, work, learn and play.
CONTACT
(212) 687-6940
New York Office
526 West 26th Street
Suite 616
New York, NY 10001
Bridgehampton Office
2273 Montauk Highway
Bridgehampton, NY 11932
The Ghost Wash House is located along the lower hillside on the north side of Camelback Mountain in Paradise Valley, Arizona. The site is flanked by two desert washes that move storm water from the top of this urban mountain into the valley below. Two long, thin tumbled brick bars run parallel to the east and west natural washes framing a third topographic condition or “Ghost Wash” that runs down the center of the site. The east bar protects this architectural wash from the low desert sun that streams across the mountain in the morning. This bar houses the public ‘support’ programs of the house: garages, kitchen, office, and family dining room. The west bar shields the occupants from the intense hot low west sun as it sets in the valley. It houses the private programs of the home: bedrooms, family room, and recreation space. The living and dining room make up the interior of long sequence of courtyards, gardens, and play areas that unfold along the Ghost Wash from the south entry to the north pool house. This linear amenity is punctuated by a massive floating roof that provides the infrastructure of storm water collection and solar power to the 8,500 sq.ft. house and landscape. As the primary organizing device for the house this central amenity infrastructure takes its cues from the nature of the Sonoran Desert. Similar to the nurse tree that shields a young cactus from the extreme heat and sun, the large roof protects the primary living spaces of the house (kitchen, dining room, living room, and family room). Its shade, power, and water both physically and symbolically nurture the life of the house. In much the same way that desert washes provide a habitat and an ecosystem that facilitates desert life and connectivity, the Ghost Wash protects, connects, and facilitates the indoor and outdoor life of the residence. The Ghost Wash House is not a house in the desert, but a house of the desert.
Founded in 2001 by Architect and Principal Darren Petrucci, Architecture – Infrastructure – Research, Inc. is an architecture and urban design firm focused on translating advanced research methods and sustainable practices into elegant design solutions that respond to each client’s particular needs and desires. The firm sees the complex contemporary environmental context of each site as an opportunity for investigation and unique solutions. Trained as both an architect and urban designer at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Darren is a Professor in The Design School at Arizona State University, and a Senior Sustainability Scientist in the Global institute of Sustainability, as well as an affiliate faculty in The School of the Future of Innovation in Society. This unique background and expertise in architecture, urban design, the science of sustainability, technology, and materials informs the design practice of A-I-R, Inc. producing cutting-edge, intelligent, and beautiful designs for its clients. A-I-R, Inc. seeks intelligent and enlightened forward-thinking clients who are interested in a collaborative environment that focuses on design solutions that engage individual sites, specific client programs, and environmental conditions.
In the shade of Orinda’s native oaks, the home produces an in intimate relationship with the surrounding trees. Their texture is reflected architecturally in a hyper-minimal palette of unfinished white oak on the walls, ceilings, and floor; the rhythm of these interior boards offers a controlled representation of the tree growth outside. Basalt flooring, white gypsum walls, and Cor-Ten steel panels provide a material counterpoint to the textured wood; the steel skin refreshes every time it rains. Developed in close collaboration with the clients are a series of innovative sustainability features that bring the mechanical and electrical systems to net zero.
Perched on 2.8 acres of steep hillside, this residence is defined by a series of cantilevered, overlapping volumes that cascade downward and ultimately nestle into the earth. Each level has a green roof and private patio with a unique scenic overlook.
The volumes of the house create garden space in the form of courtyard walls for privacy, with each rooftop doubling as garden space and outdoor lounge. Sculptural plants based on a palette of natives and low-water use succulents create a bold low-maintenance garden that complements the modern architecture.
The Summitridge interiors are modern and feminine with strong mid-century modern European influences. We selected a primarily neutral color palette of cream, ivory, blush, and violet tones. Soft curves abound, from the mid-century Vladimir Kagan Serpentine sofa and custom Marmol Radziner round parchment coffee table in the living room to the Pierre Paulin mushroom chairs and ottomans in the family room.
Marmol Radziner
All images courtesy of courtesy of Marmol Radziner
MARMOL RADZINER ARCHITECTURE
LEO MARMOL, FAIA
LEO MARMOL, FAIA
Managing Principal
As Managing Principal of Marmol Radziner since the firm was founded in 1989, Leo Marmol has extensive experience managing a variety of residential and commercial projects, including modern prefabricated homes, historic restorations, as well as public and community-based urban projects.
Active in his profession, Leo lectures widely on the topics of architecture, sustainability, and restoration. Leo has also organized numerous architectural tours in Southern California to highlight the region’s wealth of mid-century Modernist landmarks. Leo also serves on the board of trustees of the Palm Springs Art Museum.
Leo received his Bachelor of Architecture with a Minor in Philosophy from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California, in 1987. Leo was elevated to the College of the Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 2007 and inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame in 2009.
RON RADZINER, FAIA Design Principal
RON RADZINER, FAIA
Design Principal
As Design Principal of Marmol Radziner since the firm was founded in 1989, Ron has led the design of every project. He develops solutions that provide a unique architectural identity and forge strong connections between interior and exterior spaces.
Ron speaks at universities and conferences nationwide as a leader in innovative architecture, interiors, and landscape design.
Ron received his Master of Architecture in 1986 at the University of Colorado and his Bachelor of Science in 1984 at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California. In 2007, he was elevated to the prestigious College of the Fellows of the American Institute of Architects. Ron was honored as an inductee of the Interior DesignHall of Fame in 2009.
