SAVING THE FARM

With challenges on just about every side, the architect on this Sonoma remodel decided to build a separate structure and connect it with a glass-paned bridge.

IN 2013 , Aaron Wong and Jody Culp’s children Greyson and Broxton were preschoolers, and Camden, who is now 4, was still on the way. Squeezed for space in their tiny 1930s farmhouse near Sonoma’s main square, which Wong’s family has owned since 2000, they reached out to San Francisco architect Tom McElroy for help.

The 640-square-foot master suite addition McElroy designed has made the entire property feel bigger and brand new. Still quaint to look at, with archetypal gabled roofs instead of a hipped roof and new painted clapboard siding over its stucco walls, the expanded 2,260-square-foot wood-frame structure has fresh white walls inside and modern open-plan spaces that do not feel cramped.

“The house was so cute, like a child’s drawing of a house, but it also had tiny dark rooms,” says the architect, who spent nearly three years overseeing the roughly $600,000 project. One of the challenges was that the house was crammed into the corner of a four-acre lot with an heirloom grape vine, an apple tree and olive and palm trees; McElroy thought hard about where the addition would go without disturbing any of that.

“They wanted to take advantage of views of the hills but did not want a second-story addition,” he says. “And we did not want to cover either side of the house that faced the yard, so we expanded it toward the street.”

In the end, the rectangular master suite was built east of the old house and linked to it by a glass-paned bridge with awning windows that let air in. The new bedroom also has windows on all sides, and “because of the wonderful bridge, we can leave our door open and it feels as if we are outdoors,” Wong says.

McElroy created a steep gabled roof for the new suite to mimic the roof above the old front door, which now also sports a more pronounced gable than the one that was there before. “We also added a triangular clerestory window to let in more light,” the architect says. It illuminates the vestibule and the formerly dark interior of the house better than skylights would have done, especially during hot summers, when shade becomes important. For the same reason, the new roofs have deeper overhangs than the original one did.

To reconfigure the interior, the architect eliminated several walls and closets, and the living room was moved from the middle of the house (which is now the den) to the north end. The living room now faces the expansive yard and hills in the distance, visible through large new windows in the rear wall, where the old kitchen and laundry room used to be. The new open-plan space, reinforced with a steel beam, also contains a central kitchen and island that are focal points for the young family before and after school.

The modern, multipurpose interiors were completed and furnished by Wong and Culp with help from Cindy George, a family friend. Among the notable “calming, monochromatic” choices they made are accents of poplar wood that lines windowsills and storage niches.

Although they are both busy dentists, Wong and Culp — now seasoned owner-builders — are gearing up for the next remodeling phase, “before the kids become teenagers,” Wong says. The goal: to bring their picturesque old water tower back to life. n

A glass-walled “bridge” links the old and new sections of the house. The old entry porch is made grander with a higher gable roof, deep overhangs and clerestory windows that flood the foyer with light. The new master bedroom, below, built just left of the original entry porch, echoes the old architecture but with improved proportions. The uncomplicated, modern interiors were designed and completed by homeowners Aaron Wong and Jody Culp with the help of Cindy George, a family friend.

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Opposite: Allegory of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is the last of a triptych of tapestries Hope created with his wife. This page: Interactive works include a series called Everybody Is Somebody’s Terrorist, composed of hand-knit balaclava masks that can alter our perceptions of anyone wearing them. The Woulds, 2017, created for an exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, was reshown at the Catharine Clark Gallery. The immersive forest-like mixed-media piece with recorded birdsongs evokes a fairy-tale forest scape.

“THINGS HAVEN’T BEEN NORMAL,” San Francisco artist Andy Diaz Hope said recently, with a touch of irony and a trace of German accent from his immigrant family. He and his wife and fellow-artist Laurel Roth Hope, a former park ranger, were anticipating a baby, but he might just as well have been referring to the state of the world, a principal theme of his conceptual works made of wood, mirrors and other materials.

Hope started off in Silicon Valley, after studying engineering and design at Stanford, as a product designer at Apple and Microsoft. Then he worked as a technology consultant and amateur furniture maker in San Francisco.

“I was trying to design furniture for myself,” he says, and it became a creative outlet during the mid-’90s. “But I realized that my designs were becoming more conceptual and less practical. They were a critique on the way we live in the world.”

Making artful objects inspired by topics that mattered to him wasn’t a big leap. Hope grew up in the Bay Area in a multigenerational household where his grandmother was a chemist, his grandfather was a physicist and his mother, a math and art major, was a painter. “Science, engineering and design are linked. Art is not far behind,” he says.

Presciently anticipating higher rents and hard times for working artists in the city, the Hopes and another couple bought three Mission District Edwardian flats with a carriage house in 1998, and that is still where they all live and work.

For a while that work involved transforming scraps from furniture projects in Hope’s studio into art installations. Then, in 2001, while still an engineer at a tech company in San Francisco, he created the Futurator, an interactive device made from an old refrigerator reconfigured with custom software connected to video and audio equipment that could “speak.” It encouraged people to imagine, with the help of toys and props contained in the refrigerator, future technologies that might help or hinder their lives.

Using the props, “people composed stories — like in sandbox play therapy — and the Futurator recorded them. It was a mixture of analog and digital technologies,” Hope says.

On a linked monitor, “you could see videos of the stories people composed. You could also see a randomly generated loop of stories others created as well.”

The idea won artistic awards and opened the door to a career in art.

Now he explores topics such as politics, terrorism, health care and mortality. “Little things,” Hope says with a laugh. “I try to offer a counterpoint to mainstream media that often gets it wrong.” For instance, “in 1990 when I traveled from Pakistan to China before the first Gulf War, I was in tribal regions at the border