St. Francis Residence

St. Francis Residence // Atelier Cho Thompson (ACT) & Spiegel Aihara Workshop (SAW) Client: Matt and Alice Lin Hehman
Atelier Cho Thompson (ACT) and Spiegel Aihara Workshop (SAW) have completed a full home renovation and new landscape project in Hillsborough, California, a town in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. The project design was conceived around ideas of flexibility, adaptability, and resilience. ACT’s design hybridizes rooms through a series of architecturalized thresholds and transitions, in reflection of the family’s changing needs due to an increasingly hybrid WFH setup and growing family. SAW’s landscape design sought to reposition the home on its own site, re-establishing its orientation and updating its relationship to its adjacencies in their contemporary context. Taken together, the architectural and landscape interventions transformed a formerly introverted residence into a home with seamless indoor-outdoor transitions and easy spatial adaptability for living and working.
Inspired by the serene and majestic California coastline, the design of this 4BR/4BA full-home renovation and addition incorporates a focus on warm, natural materials and calming tones. The home was designed to adapt to a growing family while remaining timeless in its sensibilities. Moving library walls and operable openings all throughout the home provide flexibility and configurability. The architecture volumetrically supports an intentional ambiguity of what is privileged as the front vs back spaces. The design incorporates rounded, soft corners and strategically-placed concealed storage to address safety while providing reachable access for children in addition to hiding the clutter of toys in an unsuspecting manner. The kitchen features a patinized bronze backsplash and custom hanging shelves against a palette of cork flooring, walnut casework with metal mesh infill and saddle tan leather pulls, and matte black & satin bronze accents.
Capitalizing on the temperate weather, throughout the home the architect maximized openings and access to the exterior and continued surfaces from inside out like a kitchen counter that extends out onto the deck. A dining booth doubles as a place to work and a nearby door leads to a vine-covered trellis over an outdoor table and banquette.
The library wall of shelving in the dining room slides closed to provide privacy for an intimate event, private conference call, and opens up to the living room for parties and activities where a larger room is desired. Portals of millwork provide partitioning of space while maintaining visual access from kitchen to playroom. The living room fireplace is sheathed in travertine and patinized bronze, providing some understated flair against the white oak paneling.
The children's shared bathroom incorporates a seafoam green color on the cabinet fronts, evoking a more lighthearted mood than other rooms in the home. The subtlety of the color and sophistication of unlacquered brass sconces makes the room's mood feel current even as the children grow older. In the nearby hallway, a custom bookshelf is half integrated into the wall and half protruding out beyond, creating a ledge onto which objects and artwork can perch.
In the primary bath, the vaulted ceiling juxtaposed with the prismatic glass shower enclosure takes on a solid-void, opaque-clear relationship with an inverted, clear volume piercing through the solid. Leathered black marble flooring, rounded beach pebble floor tile, and a teak shower mat provide a warm, organic sensibility against the stark lines of the black aluminum shower enclosure and hammered brass lighting pendants. The skylight above the prismatic shower pierces down with sunlight to the wooden floor. The
main bedroom's generous daybed nestles in between shelving and overlooks the serenity of the verdant backyard landscape.
The home was initially built in 1947, and over the years the neighborhood has shifted around it. What intuitively and formally was the front of the house, facing the main thoroughfare, had been gradually fenced in on all sides with a tall, ivy-covered chain link fence, leaving nothing but the garage door on a side street to serve as the primary entrance to the home. While SAW aimed to improve the entry sequence, they left a hint of ambiguity around the front and back, amplifying the secluded former front yard’s new position as the more private “backyard” and allowing the true rear yard of the home to become a functional front porch. The primary entrance to the cottage remains along the side, but its relationship to the street has changed entirely.
A mixed Mediterranean and California plant palette with grasses, succulents and other low-water shrubs provides a green backdrop to the renovation. A line of fuzzy cacti now line up to greet visitors at the low, slatted-wood pedestrian gate, leading visitors around the side of house on a clear path to the front door.
The path cuts through a field of westringia and leucadendron shrubs to a sloping front lawn and patio filled with chartreuse euphorbia blooms and giant blue green agaves.
A narrow path lined with flowering cherry trees that fill up the picture windows in the living room, takes you to the rear yard where there is a long deck off the den and kitchen. A sinuous seat wall holds up a citrus, herb, and succulent garden, creating a striking backdrop of bright green foliage against a dark wood fence. A level turf field and basketball court complete the rear yard, which can be opened up to the side street and serves as the primary entrance for family and guests.
SAW co-director and landscape architect Megumi Aihara elaborates “Throughout the project, the landscape became inverted as the typical characteristics and adjacencies of a corner lot had been erased. The backyard is really the front yard, the front entry is really the side, and the "main" street is a forested edge. The turfed yard with the outdoor dining area is a lot like an outdoor room in many ways, and could be thought of as an extension of the house, an indoor-outdoor connection that became especially valuable in a pandemic context.”