Spaces January 2017

S A N F R A N C I S C O | M A R I N | N A PA | S O N O M A

THE ART OF LIVING SAN FRANCISCO PANORAMAS BERKELEY ARTIST'S ROOST SAN RAFAEL COLLECTOR'S ENCLAVE WINE COUNTRY ART BARN SAUSALITO HILLSIDE ATELIER TIBURON SCULPTURE GARDEN

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RIGHT PAGE

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Date: Nov. 11, 2016 Client: Roche Bobois

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Photo Michel Gibert. Special thanks: TASCHEN - www.gudea.fr. 1Conditions apply, contact store for details. 2Program available on select items, subject to availability.

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Date: Nov. 11, 2016 Client: Roche Bobois Project: RBE1679

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INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATE

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CONTENTS S PAC E S W I N T ER /S P R I N G 2 017

60 FE AT U R ES 60 OUTSI DE T HE B OX A tiered garden, decks and views define this Glen Park hideout.

By Zahid Sardar Photography by Eric Laignel

74 POI N T OF V I EW Architect Peter Pfau embraces the Marin landscape in Sausalito.

By Eva Hagberg Fisher Photography by Bruce Damonte

82 A PA I N T ER’ S PL ACE Figurative artist Christopher Brown’s Berkeley dream home.

By Zahid Sardar Photography by Cesar Rubio

88 A RCHI T ECT URA L Architect William Duff transforms a modest barn in Napa into a luminous sculpture.

By Reed Wright Photography by Matthew Millman

94 EPOCH COL L ECT I ON Baroque relics offer grand gestures in a light-filled San Rafael home.

By Sarah Lynch; photography

by David Duncan Livingston

102 PL AY I N G TO T HE Fun infuses this garden of pathways, ramps and mounds in Tiburon.

By Reed Wright Photography by Marion Brenner

GA L L ERY

ON T HE COV ER CCS Architecture designed this Glen Park home in San Francisco.

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COVER AND LEFT: ERIC L AIGNEL; COVER LOGO: TIM PASCHKE OF RESIN GLOBAL

A LCHEMY

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Home designed for you.

h o m e - d e s i g n e d fo r yo u .c o m

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DEPA RT M EN TS 22 EDI TOR’ S WELCOME 24 CON T RI B UTORS 26 L ET T ERS 31 DESI GN SPOT Wonders in unlikely places. By Zahid Sardar 37 G A L L ERY A round up of beautiful objects for the home.

Edited by Lisa Boquiren 46 F OCUS An exhibition

celebrating the Summer of Love.

By Zahid Sardar

51 MA KERS Oakland’s Rye Hudak is the prophet of plaster.

By Zahid Sardar 55 VOI CES Chip Conley wants you to have the ultimate guest experience. By Laura Hilgers

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CHILDREN’S STOOLS, $68 at Serena & Lily. serenaandlily.com UNTITLED (09092015), 2015, 30-by-40-inch light-oxidized pigment on cotton. andyvogt.com A11 TABLE by San Francisco–based Gary Hutton Design is manufactured in California from three individual steel plates.

Available to the trade at HEWNX. hewnsf.com

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37 31 BRICK-COLORED CHOOB OTTOMANS by San Francisco’s Dodd and Melina Raissnia, that would typically be sold at the couple’s San Francisco workshop under their banner Peace Industry, are now at Heath Ceramics. $660 at heathceramics. com; peaceindustry.com

115 MA KEOV ER Martin Kobus

revamps a tired Belvedere kitchen.

By Reed Wright

118 L A N DI N G Discovering La Paz, Mexico. By Zahid Sardar 125 I N B LOOM Flowers and vessels for the table. By Reed Wright

126 RESOURCES A guide to

finding what’s shown in this issue.

130 REA R WI N DOW Military bases move from artillery to art.

By Kasia Pawlowska

TOP LEFT AND BOTTOM: DAVID DUNCAN LIVINGSTON

Clockwise from top left: MARTIN KOBUS gives a Belvedere home a lift with an updated kitchen and living spaces. martinkobushome.com

110 PORT F OL I O Sculptor Andy Vogt. By Zahid Sardar

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S A N F R A N C I S C O | M A R I N | N A PA | S O N O M A

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Zahid Sardar

EDITORIAL MANAGING EDITOR Daniel Jewett EXECUTIVE EDITOR Mimi Towle GALLERY EDITOR Lisa Boquiren ASSOCIATE EDITOR Kasia Pawlowska SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER Leela Lindner COPY EDITOR Cynthia Rubin CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Laura Hilgers, Eva Hagberg Fisher,

Robert Ogata, Hanafuda 7, 2016; photo: courtesy the artist

Sarah Lynch, Reed Wright

Connect with the local art scene.

ART ART DIRECTOR Victor Maze PRODUCTION MANAGER Alex French CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Marion Brenner, Bruce Damonte, Eric Laignel, David Duncan Livingston, Matthew Millman, Aubrie Pick, Cesar Rubio, Jack Wolford

ADMINISTRATION / WEB CONTROLLER Maeve Walsh WEB/IT MANAGER Peter Thomas DIGITAL MARKETING ASSOCIATE Max Weinberg OFFICE MANAGER Kirstie Martinelli

Take a peek. Our new location now open in Bldg D #210.

We are pleased to announce that the Museum is creating a new home for our offices in Building D here at Fort Mason Center. We are also undergoing a major renovation of the Gallery exhibition space in Building A. The exhibition space is scheduled to reopen in February 2017.

MARINMAGAZINE.COM

For sales and art-placement services, visit sfmoma.org/artists-gallery

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S A N F R A N C I S C O | M A R I N | N A PA | S O N O M A

PUBLISHER Nikki Wood

ADVERTISING ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Debra Hershon ext 120 | dhershon@marinmagazine.com ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Michele Geoffrion Johnson ext 110 | mjohnson@marinmagazine.com SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGERS Leah Bronson ext 109 | lbronson@marinmagazine.com Lesley Cesare ext 113 | lcesare@marinmagazine.com ACCOUNT MANAGERS Dana Horner ext 107 | dhorner@marinmagazine.com Kirstie Martinelli ext 100 | kmartinelli@marinmagazine.com ADVERTISING ART DIRECTOR Alex French

REGIONAL SALES OFFICES WINE COUNTRY Lesley Cesare lcesare@marinmagazine.com SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Leah Bronson lbronson@marinmagazine.com NEW YORK Karen Couture, Couture Marketing 917.821.4429

READER SERVICES MAILING ADDRESS

Sue Fisher King www.suefisherking.com

3067 Sacramento Street, San Francisco, CA 94115 (415) 922-7276 (888) 811-7276

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One Harbor Drive, Suite 208 Sausalito, CA 94965 Phone 415.332.4800 Fax 415.332.3048 BULK ORDERS For information on bulk orders of SPACES, please call 415.332.4800.

Volume 2, Issue 1. SPACES is published in Marin County by Open Sky Media and Marin Magazine. All rights reserved.

Copyright©2017. Reproduction of SPACES content is prohibited without the expressed, written consent of Open Sky Media. Unsolicited materials cannot be returned. SPACES reserves the right to refuse to publish any advertisement deemed detrimental to the best interests of the community or that is in questionable taste. SPACES is mailed as a supplement to Marin Magazine to select homes and businesses in Marin County. SPACES is published biannually by Open Sky Media, One Harbor Drive, Suite 208, Sausalito, CA 94965.

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MILGARD Ž MOVING GLASS WALL SYSTEMS. DESIGN THAT MOVES. Open up to an entirely new way to look at luxury. Our Moving Glass Wall System operates smoothly and effortlessly. Despite their larger-than-life size, these doors open and close with just the push of a finger. Typically moving glass walls are only a custom option in high-end homes; Milgard has reframed the conversation. Now you can expand your living space through 12 standard sizes in 3- and 4-panel configurations. Plus, enjoy the outstanding service, support and design you’ve come to expect from Milgard.

Contact Dan McAndrew, Milgard Architectural Representative

Call (916) 919-9104 or email DanMcAndrew@milgard.com 6050 88th St, Sacramento, CA 95828

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E D ITO R ’ S W E LCO M E

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Z A H I D S A R DA R E D I TO R - I N - C H I E F, S PAC E S E M A I L : Z Y S A R DA R @ G M A I L . C O M F O L LO W O N T W I T T E R @ D E S I G N S P OT

AUBRIE PICK

the Bay Area’s Summer of Love 50th anniversary, change is in the air and perhaps also a design revolution.

Victorians are being infused with modernism; residential skyscrapers rising in San Francisco are opening new vistas; and artists’ neighborhoods have young tech entrepreneurs sinking roots.

To better reflect such demographic do-si-dos and new domiciles in San Francisco, the North Bay and the Wine Country, Marin At Home magazine will henceforth be called SPACES. Under this new rubric, our publication comes with added sections.

Focus, which will magnify a range of design subjects, picks as its first topic Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.

W E L L-T I M E D F O R

It underlines the impact of the sharing spirit of the ’60s, as BAMPFA director Larry Rinder views it, on the tech world’s open source philosophy. The first of such shows about that pivotal period, Hippie Modernism precedes one at the de Young, located in Golden Gate Park, where 100,000 hippies famously converged for 1967’s Human Be-In. Another new column, Portfolio, highlights San Francisco sculptor Andy Vogt, who, unlike other artists, wasn’t displaced by rising rents. Ironically, he raids trash bins for his preferred medium: Victorian-era lath discarded from remodeled interiors. And our department In Bloom showcases flowering Southern Hemisphere plants that will weather climate change.

San Francisco, despite its morphing face, is still home to the arts: witness places like Swissnex on Pier 17; the relatively new Minnesota Street Project, an economically sustainable arts enterprise in the Dogpatch neighborhood; and artist David Ireland’s home on Capp Street, fully restored a year ago as an exhibition and event space and base for an artist-in-residency program. Ireland was involved in transforming army barracks into an arts nexus in the Marin Headlands during the 1980s (highlighted in this issue’s Rear Window). Voices features entrepreneur Chip Conley, a leader at both Burning Man and Airbnb, who during the 1980s started the city’s artful hotel chain Joie de Vivre, giving hospitality an unconventional frame.

Our features, collectively a time capsule of the changing milieu, run the gamut. Find artist Linda Cosgrove’s collection of baroque reliquaries in Marin; a century-old barn in Napa revitalized by architect William Duff for art collectors Howard and Cindy Rachofsky; a fine bookbinder’s atelier by architect Peter Pfau in Sausalito; and a sculpture garden in Tiburon by Surface Design for art collectors Stuart and Gina Peterson. In the East Bay, artist Christopher Brown shows us his decades-old live/work loft in Berkeley.

The cover story, about a young tech nabob’s four-story home in San Francisco’s Glen Park area, features a terraced garden by Sculpt and an interior by architect Cass Calder Smith, both sprinkled with artful touches and easy-to-sink-into furniture. With that as a cue, I looked for comfort at the Flexform showroom, where, thankfully, even new designs make you feel at home.

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CO N T R I B U TO R S

I M AGE S His work has appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, Dwell, Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, Vogue and more. Millman also photographed the recently released book West Coast Modern.

MARION BRENNER Playing to the Gallery (p. 102)

Berkeley photographer Marion Brenner’s work has appeared in national and international publications, including House & Garden, Garden Design and Martha Stewart Living magazines and The New York Times. She specializes in landscape and garden photography and recently did photography for the book In & Out of Paris: Gardens of Secret Delights. Her work is also at the Berkeley Art Museum.

DAVID DUNCAN LIVINGSTON Epoch Collection (p. 94) A Real Transformation (p. 115)

A native of the Bay Area, David Duncan Livingston has been photographing for interior designers, architects, magazines and books for many years, using both natural light and strobe lighting to create compelling images. He was the sole photographer for more than five interior design books, including San Francisco Style and California Country Style.

document architecture and design for publications such as Interior Design, Metropolis, Wallpaper and Architectural Record magazines. A native Californian and a fledgling surfer, he likes to catch the waves.

JACK WOLFORD Voices (p. 55)

ERIC LAIGNEL

From Artillery to Arts (p. 130)

Outside the Box (p. 60)

Surfing fan Jack Wolford moved to Mill Valley in 1996 after six years in Santa Cruz. Besides surfing and architecture, he enjoys shooting images for lifestyle and travel stories and spent three weeks on Hokkaido photographing the wildflowers of northern Japan and of Rebun and Rishiri islands. He is a frequent contributor to Marin Magazine.

New York–based French photographer Eric Laignel splits his time between the United States and France. His work appears regularly in various international publications, including Interior Design and Architectural Digest magazines, and in several books including Berlin Interiors and Miami Interiors, both published by Taschen.

BRUCE DAMONTE MATTHEW MILLMAN

Point of View (p. 74)

Architectural Alchemy (p. 88)

San Francisco photographer Bruce Damonte was a management consultant before he changed careers. Now he travels extensively to locations around the globe to

For the past 20 years, Matthew Millman has been photographing architecture and interior design in the western United States.

CESAR RUBIO A Painter’s Place (p. 82) Southern Belles (p. 125)

Cesar Rubio, a well-known San Francisco–based photographer, documents the work of architects and designers using an approach informed by his early studio work and a love of motion pictures. His work has appeared in Architectural Record, Interior Design, Metropolis, Contract and The New York Times.

WOR DS Zaha Hadid. She is the author of two architecture books, Dark Nostalgia and Nature Framed: At Home in the Landscape. Her articles and essays on architecture and development have appeared in Metropolis, The New York Times, Architectural Record, Architect, T: The New York Times Magazine, Wallpaper*, Dwell and other publications.

EVA HAGBERG FISHER

LAURA HILGERS Voices (p. 55)

SARAH LYNCH

Point of View (p. 74)

LISA BOQUIREN

Epoch Collection (p. 94)

Eva Hagberg Fisher is a writer, critic and scholar. An architecture graduate of Princeton University and UC Berkeley, she is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Berkeley, where she is preparing a dissertation about Aline and Eero Saarinen and teaching a course on the late

Gallery (p. 37)

Sarah Lynch is a writer and magazine editor who was for seven years the editor-in-chief of California Home+Design magazine. She has authored nine interior design books; her latest one, entitled The Magical World of Mr. Ken Fulk, is about the San Francisco designer.

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Marin-based editor and writer Lisa Boquiren, who was on the steering committee for the American Institute of Architects National Convention, is a design and architecture aficionada who also maintains a marketing consultancy.

Laura Hilgers, a regular contributor to Marin Magazine, is a Bay Area writer whose work has appeared in O, Sports Illustrated, Vogue and other publications. A mother of two grown children, she lives in San Anselmo and enjoys the hiking trails of Ross Valley and Mount Tamalpais.

REED WRIGHT Architectural Alchemy (p. 88) Playing to the Gallery (p. 102) A Real Transformation (p. 115) In Bloom (p. 125)

Reed Wright’s work has appeared in Western Interiors & Design magazine and other national publications.

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In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.

- aaron rose

Lighting Design l Control Systems Electrical Contracting l Maintenance & Service

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285 Bel Marin Keys Blvd., Suite G, Novato artisticlightingcorp.com l 415.382.9500

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L E T T E R S TO T H E E D ITO R THINK BIGGER, thin glazed porcelain slabs.

Featuring 14 variations of white marble.

READERS RESPOND TO THE SUMMER/FALL 2016 ISSUE I just finished reading my new favorite magazine: Marin At Home [now called SPACES].

I wish it came every month. Congratulations.

Delanie Read, via email

SAN RAFAEL

846 West Francisco Blvd.

415-485-5180

SAN FRANCISCO 189 13 Street 415-575-3785 th

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I loved getting a look at Marin At Home; I want the A-frame house on the beach (“A-Game in Muir Beach”) — can that be arranged? A few thoughts: Marin might seem too limited a territory for a whole magazine, month after month, but Marin’s landscapes are so varied, with so many micro-ecosystems for houses to respond to and fit into, that for me, at least, that becomes sort of the subtext of the magazine.

One suggestion, if you don’t mind, which has to do with a pet peeve of mine — if at all feasible, don’t stuff pages and pages of advertising between the cover and contents page. When you open a magazine, the first thing you want to see is the table of contents, not a lot of ads. I know almost every magazine does this now; some of them force you to wade through dozens of pages of ads before you get to any editorial content. This is highly frustrating for the reader.

Mark Roller, San Francisco

JOE FLETCHER

Hurray for the barn house (“The Barn & Beyond”) — love the Swiss Army Knife metaphor. This innovative design that enhances its special setting is compellingly photographed and deftly described. Bravo Ross, Joe and Zahid.

Dan Gregory, Hanley Wood LLC, San Francisco

11/28/16 2:22 PM

I needed a place to be creative.

Paragon Real Estate is with you as you move through life’s stages & places.

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L E T T E R S TO T H E E D ITO R Congratulations on yet another fabulous Marin At Home issue — wow! I’ve only lived in Marin for six years and I am so thrilled to see that so many people and businesses I know well are featured or have small mentions. Very, very cool.

Kimberly Veley, via email Today I discovered Marin At Home — Smoke Signals on Polk carries it. I’m smitten. After reading it cover to cover I felt it outperformed all those other design magazines I’ve been purchasing. Bravo. Super article on architect John Maniscalco’s “Family Dream House.” John is my son Phillip’s neighbor, such a talent and the nicest fellow. Great writing, photographs and design.

Helen Hilton Raiser, San Francisco So happy to see what came in the mail today.

Totally surprised, and really can’t thank you enough — a full page is pretty damn hard to come by (Gallery) these days, so I really appreciate it. The magazine looks amazing. Content is great, photos are really killer, all really great projects in there.

Eddy Sykes, Los Angeles I wanted to write and congratulate you on a beautiful Marin At Home. It is such a pleasure to see an issue with so many interesting and beautifully designed spaces, and especially outstanding from a local pub versus a national brand.

Gloria Marth, via email I just finished reading the latest issue of Marin At Home and really enjoyed it. As a longtime subscriber to Architectural Digest, I find your magazine to be even more to my liking since it covers local homes (I’m a native Marinite).

Karen Hawkins, Corte Madera Thank you so much for including my book in the Design Spot section. It was a great pleasure turning pages of Marin At Home. In my humble opinion your magazine is the best on the West Coast, highlighting an excellent selection of beautifully designed homes. Your editors have impeccable taste.

Floriana Petersen, San Francisco LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Your comments may be edited for clarity and brevity. Send letters to SPACES, One Harbor Drive, Suite 208, Sausalito, CA 94965, or email us at letters@marinmagazine.com.

Please include the town where you live and a daytime phone number.

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Ad No. 16104-4b-1a – MOUNTAINSIDE TOWNHOMES Marin Home Magazine – Full page: 9" x 10.75" + .125" bleed – 4 colour process

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BY Z A H I D S A R DA R

D E S I G N S P OT

TIMELESS, IN A WORLD OF CHANGE Finding wonders in unlikely places.

is not merely an aesthetic but also a frame of mind, then the exhibition The Brothers Le Nain: Painters of 17th-Century France, at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum through January 29, is an indication of modernity well before its generally accepted time. Not unlike Andy Warhol’s studio the Factory, where works mass-produced by many assistants all bore just Warhol’s signature, the three Le Nain brothers jointly produced a vast repertoire of religious and portrait paintings at one studio and signed every piece with just the name Le Nain. The luminous oils broke new ground with graphic compositions and depictions of peasants versus nobles. famsf.org

PAINTING: THE RESTING HORSEMAN, CA . 1640 OIL ON CANVAS, © VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM , LONDON

I F M O D E R N ART

B R OOKLYN -B ASED U HU R U ,

a design firm founded by college friends Bill Hilgendorf and Jason Horvath that has created interiors for Facebook, Google, Dropbox and Tumblr, now has a foothold at the New Black in San Francisco. “At school I worked with metal and Bill with wood,” Horvath says. So, wood-and-steel furniture largely comprises their bespoke repertoire. Tack, a relatively new series inspired by the minimalist forms of Donald Judd and Tadao Ando featuring welded planes of blackened quarter-inchthick steel, includes an ovoid stool that doubles as an end table. $2,000. thenwblk.com

THE I N TR I GUI N GLY SI MPL E paper-and-magnet folding Dymaxion Globe by Brendan Ravenhill shows geodesic dome inventor Buckminster Fuller’s 1946 map of Earth as eventually redrawn by cartographer-architect Shoji Sadao in 1954. Fuller and Sadao’s version depicts the continents without visibly distorting their relative sizes and shapes, but Ravenhill’s unfolding model echoes a centuries-old fallacy: that the earth is flat. $15 each, or $40 for all three colors, black, orange and blue. areaware.com

A L E SS I : G E T S ET FO R E NTE RTAINM ENT

A N 1886 NA PA VA L L EY

Milanese designer Miriam Mirri’s polished stainless-steel or powder-coated steel book stands for Alessi in the form of a puppy named Montparnasse, a kitten called Vigo and a monkey dubbed Lola will seduce adults and children alike. $65–$85. 2. Sicilian designer Mario Trimarchi's Ossidiana, a stovetop espresso coffeemaker of cast aluminum and thermoplastic resin, for Alessi, echoes many traditional moka coffeepots, its faceted easy-to-hold form emulating shaped volcanic obsidian. Available in various sizes and black anodized and clear finishes for about $80–$120. 3. The Circus Collection, a joyful range of bowls, lidded containers, serving vessels and limited-edition accessories like nutcrackers and corkscrews, draws inspiration from the big top. Festooned with stripes, polka dots and triangular patterns, it’s the work of Dutch designer Marcel Wanders, whose 2002 gold-plated clown nose necklace for chi ha paura is a collectible. $25–$1,500. All in San Francisco. alessi.com

winery called Lombarda Cellars by Antonio Forni, who built a stone cellar and barrel room there in 1898, now houses the Freemark Abbey winery, launched in 1939 and lauded since the 1970s for its cabernet sauvignon. Last summer, a seamless renovation and modern steel-stone-woodand-glass expansion by San Francisco’s SB architects brought the 130-year-old enterprise into the 21st century, with a vast courtyard and interiors by BraytonHughes Design Studios for chefs Sang Yoon and Douglas Keane’s California-style yakitori restaurant Two Birds/ One Stone. freemarkabbey.com

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D E S I G N S P OT P O R T L A N D, ORE GO N ,

known for bicycles, beer and wine, also wants to be an oasis for gathering to discuss the business, practice and state of the visual arts. The city’s first such congress, spearheaded by gallerist Elizabeth Leach, recently assembled several illuminating art exhibitions, parties and days of symposia under the banner “Converge 45” (named for the city’s location along the 45th parallel), led by Kristy Edmunds, noted artistic director at Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. Artists and observers from around the country will again converge August 9–12 for “critical conversations about contemporary art,” Edmunds says. For the event’s second half, called “You in Mind,” she’ll choose many other venues in Oregon. A book about the 2016 Converge 45 is due out soon. converge45.org

SA N F R A N C I S CO ’S NO PA neighborhood is filled with “it” bars and restaurants, none as affordable or as chic as Horsefeather, the brainchild of bartenders Ian Scalzo and Justin Lew of Bourbon & Branch fame. The name comes from the Marx Brothers film comedy Horse Feathers, but the design has serious American craftsman overtones. “We incorporated geometric paneling that looks good during the day and also at night and won’t look dated in five years,” Scalzo says. In the quarter-sawn oak and linoleum interior, achieved with designer James Lagoc, patrons enjoy killer throwback cocktails from another era; a skylit foyer off the street is a popular garden room for brunch. horsefeatherbar.com

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AT THE PR ESI DI O in San Francisco, look for cool new lounge chairs on the main parade ground. Dubbed Social Furniture because they encourage communal interaction, the lightweight, low-density polyethylene red lounge and beach chairs are easy to move around. When flipped, they serve as picnic tables. Since they are slightly wedgeshaped, they can also be arranged as curved banquettes. The concept was refined using 3-D printed maquettes by Blaine Merker, Ghigo DiTommaso and Celsa Dockstader of the Danish urban design firm Gehl. gehlpeople.com; presidio.gov

ON E & CO ’s

award-winning 2008 Drake chair, a powder-coated welded-steel-wire indoor-outdoor design, has been recently reissued with construction improvements and in six colors. A narrower base uses less floor space; it is lighter in weight; and it comes in stackable and upholstered versions. All from Council Inc., a San Francisco company that commissions designs from around the globe. Prices vary by color; about $675. councildesign.com; thenwblk.com

I F YOU WA N T to get lost in Sonoma County, find the 25-room family-run Farmhouse Inn near Forestville, originally a 19th-century farmhouse plus eight turn-of-the-century cottages that sibling owners Joe and Catherine Bartolomei converted into a boutique hotel more than a decade ago. It’s an unexpected design gem in the Russian River valley: surrounded by wineries, its several barnlike peak-roofed additions evoke authentic country living yet contain modern amenities in an out-of-the way place. The rooms, recently revamped by late Healdsburg interior designer Myra Hoefer, sport her signature white-and-gold palette and a few woodsy, rustic counterpoints; a new spa building designed by San Francisco’s SB Architects resembles stables, with horse murals in the treatment rooms. A new fire pit near the pool invites congregating in the evening over gourmet s’mores; the inn’s Michelin-starred restaurant, with a menu incorporating organic ingredients grown on property, allows grand dining too. And in your room, find the Bartolomeis’ own wine: it’s called Lost & Found. farmhouseinn.com

B OU N TY B R ASSWA R E ’s Pop Down drain for sinks with and without overflow valves sits flush with the surface even when it is draining. Its spring-action cartridge can be easily replaced without dismantling the entire drain: just push in to close or spring open to lift it out for cleaning. Made of brass, the smart Australian design is now available in the Bay Area. Prices, per finish, $99–$200. bountybrassware.us

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D E S I G N S P OT hand-spun Afghan wool, these knotted Pakistani kilims called Lattice, designed by Paris-based brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for Barcelona’s Nanimarquina rug company, veer from their traditional rectangular cousins made in the Indian subcontinent. Here the pattern of rhythmic stripes determines the jagged form of the rug. The rug is offered in two standard color palettes or can be customized. For standard sizes and colors, prices range from about $700 to $7,000, at Desgnare in San Francisco. desgnare.com

A LTHOU GH MA DE OF

F O R M E R G A LLERIST turned developer/entrepreneur Amir Mortazavi, industrial designer Yves Behar and entrepreneur Steve Mohebi have made a new kind of shelter. Canopy, a members-only skylit Pacific Heights space for independent workers craving community in a shared space, has a range of meeting places amid its thicket of black marble columns: a lounge; round-the-clock casual or dedicated spaces at Herman Miller tables; and individual glass cabins for high-decibel meetings. The cool chandeliers, designed by Mortazavi and Behar, have sound-absorbent high-density foam to further mitigate enthused co-worker noise. Monthly rates range from $650 to $5,500. canopy.space

G LO B E -T R OT TING C H E F Brandon Jew of Bar Agricole and Quince fame has come home to the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown at his new Chinese restaurant and bar, Mr Jiu’s. Designed by Boor Bridges Architecture in conjunction with Jew’s wife Anna Chet Jew-Lee, the modern, low-budget interior achieves high-end notes with black lacquered steel columns, startling jade green ceilings, and three vintage gilded lotus chandeliers and other light fixtures from a former banquet hall. Custom Fireclay tiles, a scroll drawing on paper by Ashton Love, and a blackened steel back bar with inset aquariums — a staple in traditional Chinese eateries — also make a dramatic appearance. mrjius.com

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THE LATE-CA R EER monograph and catalogue raisonné has given way to a new kind of book that veers between artistic portfolio and tidy self-promotion with the imprimatur of a publisher. Among the best of the latter genre are three Bay Area books about art and interiors.

1. ART H OUSE , by Alisa Carroll, Assouline, $85, with photographs by Matthew Millman, features views of three homes in the Bay Area and two in Los Angeles that were built between the 1940s and 2015. Together, the homes contain artworks by artists like Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp that roughly correspond to the time each house was built. The interiors are by San Francisco designer Gary Hutton and the midcentury and contemporary art, collected by SFMOMA trustee Chara Schreyer, is conceptually tethered to each house. For example, midcentury art is housed in her Eichler in Belvedere from the same period.

2. MR. KE N FULK’S MAG I CAL WORLD ,

by Ken Fulk, Abrams, $75, with principal photography by Douglas Friedman, has a a keyhole image on the cover that invites peering in. Once you do, it’s a visual feast, with more than 200 provocative pictures of Fulk’s over-the-top interiors — inside a jet; with bare-chested revelers at his leather shop

in San Francisco, beside the Exploratorium, is the new home for the Consulate General of Switzerland, the Swiss Business Hub, Switzerland Tourism and the Swissnex culture center, where science, education, art and innovation all have a forum.

At the entrance is the classic Swiss Railways clock; in back a view of the Bay Bridge.

Inside, the warehouse atmosphere brings academics, entrepreneurs, innovators, artists and designers together. Exhibitions, curated

by Swissnex, currently feature furniture maker Vitra. swisspier.org. And timely large or small versions of the Swiss Railways wall clock are

by Mondaine. $235–$455. mondaine-usa.com

SWITZERLAND AT PIER 17

turned interior design studio; at a costume party he worked on for tech entrepreneur Sean Parker and singer Alexandra Lenas’s wedding in Big Sur. Shots of San Francisco watering holes like the Cavalier or the Battery are other treats.

Yes, the book serves as advertising but Fulk’s irreverent exuberance is entertaining.

3 . OLI VE R RAN C H , by Jean Simon, Gregory R. Miller & Co, $60, describes the fascinating ways artworks were fabricated or constructed on a private ranch-turned-arts-nonprofit in Sonoma County. There, collectors Steve and Nancy Oliver have invited the likes of sculptor Richard Serra to install breathtaking immovable works. oliverranchfoundation.com

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E D I T E D BY L I S A B O Q U I R E N

G A L L E RY

THE SPOKES LED PENDANT LIGHT in two delicate globular shapes

by Vicente García Jiménez and Cinzia Cumini for Foscarini was inspired by the spokes of a bicycle wheel. The silver aluminum or golden varnished steel ribs evoke ancient lanterns and birdcages. Available for about $1,900 at Arkitektura. arksf.com

CIRCLING BACK Globes, cool curves and familiar bent forms to counter sharp edges and shiny polished steel.

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G A L L E RY

JULY STOOL or SIDE TABLE by Nao Tamura for Nikari is made of two woods — oak and elm — with a natural oil finish. Made in Finland.

Available from $680 at Bright on Presidio. brightonpresidio.com

RING PENDANT designed by Stephan Gulassa for Phoenix Day Lighting features LED lamping with removable shade fabric. Shown here in faux pewter and offered in standard and custom finishes.

Available to the trade at Sloan Miyasato. sloanm.com

LOTUS TABLE from Toronto-based Powell & Bonnell features black stoneware clay finished in either hand-brushed antique pewter glaze, shown here, or satin white glaze hand-blasted for a matte finish. Available to the trade at Shears & Window. shearsandwindow.com

THE EMBROIDERY CHAIR series by Swedish designer Johan Lindstèn features an ash wood body and wraparound backrest with cross-stitch embroidery on tapestry wool. Four color/ season options available.

Price upon request at Arkitektura. arksf.com

SARONG STOOL from Toronto-based Powell & Bonnell features an ergonomic design, an integrated handle and unique knot detail. Offered in a select range of leather. Available to the trade at Shears & Window. shearsandwindow.com

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G A L L E RY

OTTO by David Weeks features a strip of LED diodes with a powder-coated shade interior and handcrafted warm brass arm.

In-store purchase only starting from $7,500 at Dsegnare. dsegnare.com

MBRACE WING CHAIR & FOOTSTOOL by Sebastian Herkner for DEDON features an extra-wide seat back, optional cushion seats and an open, mesh-like weave of three different DEDON fibers atop a solid teak base (footstool not shown). Available in Spice, Atlantic and Pepper, shown here. Available to the trade at Dunkirk. dunkirksf.com

THE CAMILLE TABLE by Brett Design NYC comprises 3 tiers of swivel trays. Shown here in back-painted tempered glass top with luggage leather in Mystic Toasted Almond. Custom finishes available. Available to the trade at HEWNX. hewnsf.com

JESSIE BLACK X QUINOA LEATHER BUCKET is handmade in Paris from natural leather, shown here in natural, with brass studs. Available in the U.S. exclusively at Jessie Black for $660. jessieblack.com

TEN ARMCHAIR by Michael Schneider for Conde House with either walnut or Japanese ash frame comes in several combinations including resin back and leather-upholstered seat (shown here). Trade pricing at 415.864.8666; retail price available at condehouse.com.

CHARADE CAPSULE DAYBED by Jonathan Adler features the designer’s signature sphere and cone legs in brass and is upholstered in Bergamo Azure Velvet (only fabric option). Available for $2,750 at Jonathan Adler. jonathanadler.com

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G A L L E RY

FADE features a blowmolded polycarbonate teardrop shape with a metalized finish graduating from completely reflective to transparent. Price upon request at Arkitektura. arksf.com

BEACON FLOOR LAMP from Toronto-based Powell & Bonnell features a hand-forged metal frame, shown here with a satin black finish and a white linen shade. A wire “bird’s nest” (not shown) holds the lamp. Offered in nickel, brass, pewter and bronze finishes. Available to the trade at Shears & Window. shearsandwindow.com

DEAN ARMCHAIR by Jean-Marie Massaud for DEDON is made from cast aluminum, with hidden fastenings and double-layered sling fabric over a tension frame with solid teak armrest insets. Available to the trade at Dunkirk. dunkirksf.com

GELATO SIDE TABLE from MRCW Design + Build is handcrafted by Oakland-based master woodworker Christopher Weiss. It features custom turned brass feet with a tapered brass wedge securing the top and is hand-finished with tung oil.

In-store purchase only for $2,850–$3,250 at Turtle & Hare. turtleandhare.net

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WHISK TABLES by San Francisco– based Ted Boerner feature a smoky glass top on a metal strap frame encased in two tones of edgestitched leather. Available in three sizes (as shown). Available to the trade at HEWNX. hewnsf.com

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Architecture and Interior Design by Photograph by Matthew Millman

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G A L L E RY

DO-MARU features a cast aluminum back support and a padded seat, available in either fabric or leather upholstery, atop a tubular metal anterior support with black chromed or pewter painted finish. Price upon request at Arkitektura. arksf.com

MONDRIAN COFFEE TABLES by Jean-Marie Massaud for Poliform feature an aluminum structure and legs supporting thin table tops in a wide range of finishes, including Spessart Oak and St. Laurent Marble (shown here).

Price upon request at Poliform San Francisco. poliformusa.com

BARNES CHANDELIER, shown here in brushed stainless steel, features six slender metal cylinders with up and down lighting controlled by a three-way switch. Also offered in solid brass with various finishes and configurations. Made to order starting at $6,000. robertlonglighting.com

JACKSON ACCENT LAMP features a 4-inch solid copper tube offered in both polished and oxidized finishes and with LED lamp option. Designed and manufactured in Sausalito by Robert Long Lighting.

Made to order starting at $420. robertlonglighting.com

KAMUY SIDE TABLE

by Naoto Fukasawa for Conde House features marble top in either walnut in natural finish (shown here) or Japanese oak in natural, gray wash or black lacquer. Made in Japan. Trade pricing at 415.864.8666; retail price at condehouse.com.

BIG ARM SOFA designed by Los Angeles–based Chelsea Park features 50 percent wool, 50 percent polyester high-density foam cushion with brass-plated metal legs. Shown here in indigo felt fabric. Available online only for $1,499 at Capsule. capsulehome.com

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FO C U S

BY Z A H I D S A R DA R

UNSUNG ORACLES An exhibition celebrating the Summer of Love links hippies to DIY architecture and tech innovation in the Bay Area.

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OPPOSITE: BARRY SHAPIRO PHOTOGR APH ARCHIVE/BANCROFT LIBR ARY, UC BERKELE Y; CLOCK WISE FROM TOP LEFT: NICK DEWOLF; FROM BARRY SHAPIRO ARCHIVE, BANCROFT LIBR ARY, UC BERKELE Y; COURTESY OF DEBR A BAUER; ROBERT SOMMER, © CCA /C ARCHIVES AT CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF THE ARTS LIBR ARIES

Opposite: Howard Waite home, Canyon, California, circa 1968, built by Waite as a log cabin with a curving hyperbolic paraboloid roof. This page, clockwise from top left: A 1970s towering “Madonna” barge by sculptor Chris Roberts and a “Spanish Helmet” floating home in Sausalito; a tepee-framed bedroom from the 1973 book, Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher’s Art; Debra Bauer and Rodney Price, members of the Angels of Light; a driftwood and flotsam replica of UC Berkeley’s Campanile towers over the Emeryville mudflats DIY sculpture gallery from the 1970s.

San Francisco’s Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury district became a symbol for the burgeoning hippie movement, several museums will highlight counterculture design and its modern-day impact.

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, organized by the Walker Art Center and curated

by Andrew Blauvelt, director of Cranbrook Art Museum, with the assistance of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, will be the first such exhibition to open in the Bay Area, February 8–May 21 at BAMPFA. The museum’s director, Lawrence Rinder, and UC Berkeley associate professor of architecture Greg Castillo have added works by Bay Area artists such as sculptor/builder J. B. Blunk and designer Frances Butler, as well as vintage ephemera, photographs and films, to highlight the transformation launched by 100,000 young antiwar rebels who gathered for a human be-in at Golden Gate Park and changed the course of the ’60s and ’70s.

FIFTY YEARS AFTER

“Hippie Modernism is the deliberate collision of two terms that provoke a conceptual conflict,” Castillo explains. It recasts much-maligned “smelly” hippies as having the disruptive qualities that modern technology firms cherish. “The term hippie was a media invention that typically defined the counterculture by its lowest common denominator. We often remember sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, but not the aesthetic experimentation that went with them,” Castillo says.

But the alternative communities in cities like San Francisco and in rural Sonoma and Humboldt counties, where land was cheap, became in essence startup enterprises — generating funds for a community short on cash yet rich in skills and innovation. Counterculture members were the first to raise consciousness about sustainable living, regenerative design that mimics nature, social justice and the virtues of shared economies, concepts that have now become mainstream.

In Berkeley, for instance, hippies invented methods of linking industrial waste to consumer

practice and began recycling. They introduced a DIY building movement, in which artists such as Butler printed fabrics and made clothes she described as “reading environments.” In the San Francisco psychedelic free theater group Angels of Light, bearded gay men in drag viewed their bodies as laboratories of cultural evolution. Such new zones of enterprise, which architect Buckminster Fuller might have called “liberated territories,” Castillo says, also included, in Santa Cruz, organic farming, which has mushroomed into a more than $43 billion industry nationwide.

The exhibition juxtaposes Community Memory, a 1973 public computer network formed in Berkeley by members of the Village of Arts and Ideas commune, with today’s online social communities like Twitter to show how the Bay Area’s counterculture foreshadowed the World Wide Web. “Open source and open spirit led to the very structure of the internet,” Rinder says.

“Hippies were self-building in every way,” Castillo observes. “They created homes that could S PAC E S W I N T E R / S P R I N G 2 0 1 7

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FO C U S

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not be understood within establishment conventions of modern design and that were torn down because building inspectors targeted their ragtag communities.” One of the most successful anarchist communities living on Sausalito houseboats was systematically destroyed but its impact spread as hippie modernism produced a new cultural geography. Its nomads moved between New Mexico and the Bay Area, which had each become epicenters of unconventional lifestyles and related publishing. The underground publication San Francisco Oracle reached nearly 500,000 readers at its height.

In Mendocino County, the Albion Nation, a back-to-the-land retreat, published an influential feminist journal called Country Women.

“The surge of counterculture publishing served as a teaching tool and an open resource like the Whole Earth Catalog,” Castillo says of the back-to-the-land handbook published regularly from 1968 to 1972.

The ideas were disseminated and spread to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to upstate New York and along the international hippie trail from London to Goa, India, and on to Sydney, Australia. “Cheap printing, underground newspapers and posted flyers were the hippie internet,” Castillo says. “They were social media for pilgrims in search of self and new communities marked by evolutionary consciousness.” bampfa.org n

’70s LEGACY Four artists’ and writers’ dwellings designed in 2011 by San Francisco– and New York–based architect Cass Calder Smith, who grew up in a Santa Cruz Mountains off-grid commune in California during the ’70s, are the size of shipping containers, all aimed at ocean views. They are for participants in the lauded Djerassi Resident Artists Program, founded in 1979 by chemist Carl Djerassi on a former cattle ranch in coastal Woodside in the Peninsula. The modern Modernism) echo hippie design-build structures on the West Coast. A canted steel frame canopy with solar panels and skylights hovers, above these communal yet private live/work wood-clad pods, like a stretched tarp. Interestingly, Djerassi was also

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one of the creators of the 1960s contraceptive pill that became a catalyst of the sexual revolution during the hippie era. The relatively new studios are dedicated to his wife, feminist writer and Anne Sexton biographer Diane Middlebrook. djerassi.org

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COURTESY OF CC S ARCHITECTURE

studios by CCS Architecture (not included in Hippie

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RCI CONSTRUCTION

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BY Z A H I D S A R DA R

MAKERS

PROPHET OF PLASTER

IN STUDIO: NICOLO SERTORIO/PHOTONICOLO

A Bay Area craftsman’s low-relief impasto techniques elevate gypsum, clay, slaked lime and marble aggregate to the level of art.

Rye Hudak works at his Oakland studio under a strong light so he can see textures forming in wet plaster.

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“AS A MATERIAL, PLASTER IS ORGANIC, IS UNIQUE WHEN IT SETS, AND CAN BE UNPREDICTABLE.”

Some of Hudak’s art panels recently shown at Paige Loczi Design in San Francisco. Clockwise from top left: Bleached Alligator, Untitled, Toast, Rammed Earth and Aerial.

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MAKERS

TEXTURES: HARRY MUNIZ/COURTESY OF RYE HUDAK

A R T I SA N A L P L AST E R ,

the stuff that interior designers and architects routinely spec for walls in lieu of paint, is usually an elegant backdrop for furnishings, but Oakland plasterer Rye Hudak has bigger plans for his medium. He wants plaster to be the star.

He recalls the time he was first recruited, as a teenager, by his father, a professional painter, to restore horsehair-and-plaster wall surfaces in old colonial buildings in New Sharon, a tiny town near their home in Maine.

Now, skilled at hand-troweling smooth expanses of naturally derived eco plaster and at the helm of his own decorative finishes company called Level 5 Design, Hudak, 41, has found a more engrossing distraction.

The abstract expressionist plaster works Hudak makes in his spare time are an all-consuming passion because each one is different, as some of the unique titles — Aerial, Burnt Toast and Bleached Alligator — clearly indicate. The four-by-four-foot creations are made on medium-density-fiberboards and range in price from $2,500 to $5,500. Recently exhibited at Paige Loczi’s design studio/gallery in San Francisco, these heavily textured and layered Italian slaked limestone plaster, earth, clay and cement creations, in deep graphites, gunmetal grays, shades of bone and earthen tints, sometimes evoke Anselm Kiefer–esque landscapes seen from the air.

Perhaps one inspiration for these mesmerizing topographic renderings in plaster was Hudak’s childhood full of summer walks along riverbanks and skiing on mountain slopes in winter. His parents, who were “back-to-landers and hard-core college-educated hippies,” Hudak says, raised him in woods far out of town in an off-grid country barn they built for themselves. There was no electricity, but his mother was a candle maker, so there was always light when they needed it.

“We had a hand pump for water from a well, and it wasn’t until the early ’80s when I was 8 years old that we finally got a phone,” Hudak recalls. “There were no neighbors in that remote setting, but there was always nature.”

Not surprisingly, it is comforting for him to tease earth and clay mixed sometimes with plaster and cement into facsimiles of the land he once knew intimately.

“As a material, plaster is organic, is unique when it sets, and can be unpredictable,” he observes.

To achieve his artful effects, he uses techniques carefully mastered on the job and insights gleaned from his own experiments. He

Hudak works swiftly to form freehand striations in plaster on medium-density-fiberboards.

knows that Venetian slaked lime plasters can be worked longer than faster-setting hydraulic plasters, and when some plasters cure faster or slower than he wants, he has learned to slow down or accelerate the process. “I also work sometimes with cements to cast a texture and add them to the mix,” Hudak says.

His otherwise natural eco-conscious palette includes domestic cotton plasters as well as traditional plasters from Trieste mixed with marble aggregate from Carrara. None of it is exactly new. Hudak’s slaked lime plasters date back to the Roman Empire; earth-and-straw adobe from the Taos Pueblo tradition goes back a thousand years; and Japan’s Wara Juraku, a traditional earthen plaster composed of clay, sand and rice chaff, is one of his favorites.

Plaster, the go-to practical surfacing material for millennia, is now admired for its aesthetic qualities more than ever before, and Hudak explores that. The process for making his panels, depending on the number of layers applied and their drying time, takes about a week. Hudak’s panels are laid flat on a table surface, where he applies a base coat, a topcoat and sometimes added wax. He then distresses the surface and adds more plaster/clay/cement layers spontaneously to build the surface up about one-quarter-inch thick. “Unlike wall finishes, this does not have to be formulaic because consistency is less relevant than creative expression. That is exciting,” Hudak says.

Armed with a visual studies degree from Dartmouth College, he went to Italy during the late ’90s and began to consider the rich,

almost metaphysical qualities of plaster at the Art Institute of Florence and later at La Cipressaia Studio in Montagnana, an artist’s residency hosted by South Africans Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky, who collectively call themselves Rosenclaire.

“You could not walk 200 yards without seeing some form of decorative plaster in Italy,” Hudak says. “Even in austere modern interiors with walls that have flush baseboards, plaster brings an earthy, organic and decorative quality,” he adds.

“No other ornament is required when plaster is juxtaposed against tile, glass, steel and wood.”

In the Bay Area, Hudak is at the confluence of the plaster trade, interior design and fine arts, working alongside several collaborators. In San Francisco that includes Anthem Interiors, Aidlin Darling Design, Feldman Architects and Gensler; in the East Bay, interior designer Michelle Wempe of Zumaooh; and in Marin, EDG, which is using his skills for a project in Hawaii.

The work is often experimental, but even so he usually has “to create reproducible results that are scalable on large surfaces,” Hudak says. “But with my smaller panels I can go much further as an artist because they can be one-of-a-kind.”

A recent seven-by-nine-foot Japanese-plaster panel installed at Palo Alto’s Yayoi, a restaurant designed by Aya Yanagisawa, is also larger than most. Hudak had to work after-hours to install it, but he was determined to stretch.

“I have always wanted to elevate plaster, quite literally, off the wall plane,” he says. “Now, by putting my work in a frame, I ask the viewer to think of it as art.” ryehudak.com n S PAC E S W I N T E R / S P R I N G 2 0 1 7

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BY L AU R A H I LG ERS

VOICES

THE ULTIMATE GUEST EXPERIENCE

JACK WOLFORD

When Airbnb executives wanted someone to provide a better and more consistent experience for users of the service, they naturally turned to Chip Conley.

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Fabricating and Installing Custom Wood Floors for Thirty Years 305 Cutting Blvd, Richmond, CA • 510 558 2030 • www.tulipfloors.com

I F YO U WA N T to make a private phone call in the office-free workspace of Airbnb’s San Francisco headquarters, you need to retreat to a tiny windowless room with a narrow couch nestled between shag-carpeted walls. It’s where Chip Conley, the company’s head of global hospitality and strategy, has chosen to talk to a visitor, and where Conley, a tall, lean man who brims with Zen-like energy (he meditates twice daily), settles in as he describes the approach to hospitality he formed as a 26-year-old, when he started Joie de Vivre Hotels.

“There were very few companies in the world whose name was also the mission of the company,” says Conley, “but our whole premise was celebrating the joy of life, for employees as well as guests. We wanted you to feel like we were entertaining you in our own home.”

Joie de Vivre even called its front desk clerks “hosts,” a notion that is not lost on Conley today. “That was 30 years ago,” he says, “and weirdly, I’m now at Airbnb, helping our hosts be great at hospitality.”

If Conley seemed an unlikely choice to guide Airbnb’s 1.4 million hosts worldwide in helping guests feel at home, he’s not. When the company hired him four years ago, Airbnb executives were looking for someone who could make their guest experience more consistent — and place Airbnb solidly alongside traditional hotels. Who better than Conley?

He had bucked conventional wisdom before,

“Every hotel was based on a magazine. We came up with five adjectives that defined that magazine, and created a hotel around that.” proving his mettle as an entrepreneur with an unconventional 52-property boutique hotel chain and as a thought leader, with four books, including Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, to his credit.

Even before then, Conley was used to breaking new ground. When he arrived in San Francisco 30 years ago, after completing his Stanford undergraduate and Master of Business Administration degrees, the Long Beach native planned to become a real estate developer. But finding the profession dry, he decided to open 56

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An atrium at Airbnb’s San Francisco headquarters is ringed by offices and meeting rooms that reflect the range of homes in the company’s repertoire.

a boutique hotel instead — despite having no hotel experience. “I was looking for something more creative that also made people feel good,” he says. “Plus, I love to travel.”

It was 1987, when boutique hotels were hitting the scene in the United States. Ian Schrager had started his ultrahip (and expensive) hotels, and Bill Kimpton had created his more corporate boutique lodging. Neither felt right to Conley. “Chip thought boutique hotels didn’t have to be so hip and that they could be affordable,” says Oren Bronstein, former head of design development for Joie de Vivre and now owner of Oren Bronstein Designs.

To prove the point, Conley purchased a payby-the-hour motel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district and transformed it into the Phoenix, in his words a “rock ’n’ roll hotel that would appeal to musicians on the road and creative types.”

With the Phoenix, Conley also created the formula he would use with all his Joie de Vivre hotels, from Costanoa in Pescadero to Hotel Erwin in Venice Beach. “Every hotel was based on a magazine,” says Conley. “We came up with five adjectives that defined that magazine, and created a hotel around that.”

For the Phoenix, the magazine was Rolling Stone, and the descriptors Conley and his staff came up with were funky, irreverent, adventurous, cool and young-at-heart. “Everything we did in the hotel, from the design of the guest rooms to the unique services to the staff we hired, all came back to those five adjectives,” Conley says.

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He also hired Marin native Zio Ziegler to paint wraparound graffiti at the entrance of the hotel and filled each room with art from students at the San Francisco Art Institute. “We thought that art should be iconic and give you a sense of the place,” Conley says, “so we typically worked with local artists.” For three years, he also hosted an art festival at the hotel, ArtPadSF, co-founded with Maria Jenson, executive director of SOMArts Cultural Center.

It worked. The hotel quickly drew the rock ’n’ roll crowd, from David Bowie to Linda Ronstadt to Johnny Depp, and Conley used the formula to create another 51 completely unique hotels.

“The Hotel Vitale in San Francisco, for example, was Real Simple meets Dwell,” says Conley. “Dwell was modern and urbane and Real Simple was fresh, natural and nurturing.”

In design terms, this translated to lavender sprigs in wood pallets at the door signage, as well as natural woods and stone in the rooms.

It also meant soft blue patterns in the bedding and blue-green carpet, all of which mimicked the bay just outside the windows.

“What we found was that the people who fell in love with the hotel were people who might use those five adjectives to describe themselves,” says Conley. “Literally, in the design and habitat, we created something that helped guests refresh the sense of who they were.”

Conley sold the company in 2010 and was “sort of retired” when Airbnb approached him.

He had planned to move to Baja (where he has a home), learn to surf and work on Fest300. com, his website devoted to festivals, a passion of Conley’s. A devoted Burner, he sits on Burning Man’s board and helps fund some of the festival’s art. “When Airbnb came to me, I said I’ll do 15 hours a week,” says Conley. “Within three weeks, I realized it was going to be 15 hours a day.”

Conley’s job was huge: to teach Airbnb hosts how to create “a great hospitality experience for the guest.” Toward that end, he created nine quality standards all hosts need to honor, including accuracy (your photos should actually show what the place looks like), communication (follow up with your guests after they arrive), cleanliness and amenities.

As part of the job, he also teaches a “Hospitality Moments of Truth” class, both in webinars and in person, around the world. Among his nuggets? The five-five-five rule. “Stimulate your guests’ five senses the first five minutes they walk in the door, using the five adjectives you’d

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Pops of primary colors and Asian-style chairs in a meeting room at Airbnb’s offices in San Francisco.

pick to describe your home,” Conley says. “If someone walks in the door and there’s a bowl of apples they could actually eat, there’s Enya music playing in the background, and there’s an aromatherapy candle, that’s a positive experience.”

Since Conley has been on board, Airbnb hosts have made huge improvements in service levels, and now the company has a Net Promoter Score — the hospitality standard, used to measure guest satisfaction — that’s 50 percent higher than the hotel industry average.

If the concept of home is dear to Conley, it’s because he’s on the road about a third of the year and has visited 60 countries (with no Kindle, either; he still lugs paper books). Whether it’s to an Airbnb listing in India, the hot Nevada desert of Burning Man or a windowless room with shag rug walls in the company’s headquarters, he settles in quickly.

“Because he travels so much, the world is his home,” says SOMArts’ Jenson. “He’s at ease with a lot of different ideas and people, and he knows it’s about being welcoming and open.

He likes to share the idea that you’re at home no matter where you are.” As evidence, his San Francisco house is filled with indigenous art and photographs he’s picked up in India, Morocco, Bali, Mexico and Japan.

Soon, Conley will be moving to another home. He’s about to semiretire (again) and move to Baja, where he plans to write a book on being a “modern elder,” exploring what millennials and boomers can learn from each other.

The first thing he’ll do when he moves is open the boxes with the art and the books. “I don’t care about the dishes, the linens or even my own clothes,” Conley says. “But the art and books — they’re like breathing, educating things in my life. They are living for me.” n S PAC E S W I N T E R / S P R I N G 2 0 1 7

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Clockwise from this page: For a San Francisco home, CCS Architecture formed a foyer gallery, with a pivoting red front door, in which a framed cast plaster panel, “Still Life With Fruit”

by Matthew Palladino, hangs above a bench that contains slippers for guests; the charred cedar exterior is complemented with a tall entry porch lined with back-painted red glass; a bleached Douglas fir wood staircase, with side walls perforated for display niches, goes from the foyer to the third floor, interrupted only by a second-floor landing.

A SAN FRANCISCO HIDEOUT, WHOSE SPARE, ART-FILLED INTERIOR OPENS TO SPECTACULAR VIEWS, A TIERED GARDEN AND DECKS, IS DESIGNED FOR LIVING INSIDE AND OUT.

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BY Z AH I D SAR DAR P H OTOG R AP H S BY E R I C L AI G N E L

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IN A FAST-PACED DIGITAL WORLD,

disruption is a virtue. So although this 1930s house in San Francisco’s verdant Glen Park area had been extensively remodeled in 2012, its new owner, a 28-year-old tech entrepreneur, wanted to make further changes.

The four-story, 4,000-square-foot building on a steep up-sloping hillside had four bedrooms, a media room, several bathrooms, a panoramic view of the city and bay, and easy access to Silicon Valley. But its unfinished backyard, gray stucco exterior, gray-stained oak floors, walnut casework and hemmed-in hallways were all unremarkable.

To put his stamp on what is the very first home he has called his own, the young owner enlisted the help of Akemi Tamaribuchi Reed, his former hairstylist, who is now his design touchstone.

“My role is very atypical,” Reed, who heads a lifestyle consultancy firm called Subject to Change, explains.

The backyard, only accessible via a footbridge off the fourth-floor living spaces, was a priority, so, in 2013, Reed got landscape designers John and Danielle Steuernagel of the San Francisco firm Sculpt to work on it. Then came architect Cass Calder Smith, whose New York/San Francisco–based firm CCS Architecture was hired to rethink the flooring and the staircase, which rises in a straight line between the foyer and the third floor before it switches back to go up to the fourth floor. Before long, the project scope grew to include the interiors and the facade.

Working alongside each other, both teams dovetailed their design expertise to craft a seamless indoor/outdoor living space.

John Steuernagel, who grew up in New Jersey with a father in the flower nursery business, started Sculpt in 2003. Many unique gardens ensued, including one for a blind man, but access-wise, none as challenging as the one in Glen Park.

The Sculpt team easily added a koi pond and a heated Helios bench

by Galanter & Jones in an existing open-to-sky grotto with a waterfall fountain off a rear guest room on the third floor.

The rest of the 100-foot-deep tiered yard, previously shored up by stacked rubble, took nearly two years to redo with new concrete retaining walls and terraces. Now, the footbridge leads to a dining patio with a fire pit and an outdoor kitchen; farther uphill are a sunken stainless steel hot tub and an outdoor shower, an artificial lawn with lounge chairs and bleachers and, at the very top, a plinth for an observation shed.

CCS, led by project architect Bjorn Steudte, later transformed the shed into a sculptural 10-by-10-foot mirrored cube, with a cylindrical interior that contains an oculus inspired by artist James Turrell’s Skyspaces.

Midway up the garden, an old apple tree was heavily pruned and saved, and plantings such as palms, leafy tropical philodendrons, Colocasia “elephant ears” and creeping leucadendron ground cover were added. At the very top, a green wall with Soleirolia soleirolii, or baby’s tears, combined with dwarf geraniums came from Flora Grubb nursery.

“The owner loves bright colors and pop art and we wanted something cartoony, young and fun outside as well,” Danielle Steuernagel, who used to be an event planner, says.

Inside the house, “My client was still trying to define his style,” Reed adds. However, as an MIT dropout who came to the Bay Area to start a tech company, he is partial to modernism and rejected the house’s decorative hardware and other flourishes.

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Counterclockwise from this page: On the second floor, under stairs with clear glass railings, a found-wood-and-metal piece made of old bike handlebars near a wet bar with a veined black marble backsplash is by Kirk Stoller from the Romer Young Gallery; the bar is conveniently just outside a black-painted home theater with colorful Roche Bobois seating with Missoni fabric; a spare bedroom is now a music room, where in place of a closet, CCS designed a padded nook for the owner to play his guitars.

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With CCS, Reed eliminated those and added a wealth of new materials. “I knew that the owner wanted to live in a space that did not feel plastic,” she explains.

So the building now has distinctive charred-cedar shou-suji-ban Japanese-style matteblack siding, with stainless-steel edging around the Fleetwood aluminum windows.

A tall, skinny entry porch is lined with bright back-painted red Oikos glass. A new 8-foot-high steel front door with electronic hardware pivots opens to reveal a well-lit foyer that is designed as an art gallery; currently, a Matthew Palladino cast-plaster work called “Still Life With Fruit” is showcased there; on the second floor, under the staircase, a found-wood-and-metal piece by Kirk Stoller incorporates old bike handlebars.

“Cass’ design team also widened and flared out the bottom of the stairs to make them feel grander,” Reed says, pointing to cutaway walls made of painted medium-densityfiberboard (MDF) and above them, new three-quarter-inch-thick glass that replaced floriated metal railings. Existing flat steel handrails, stripped of paint, are left bare.

“Victorians took stairs seriously and so did we,” Smith says. “We made a showy steel staircase encased in bleached Douglas fir treads and risers by First Last & Always.”

Wood cladding also reappears in the top section of the stairwell’s north parti-wall.

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Clockwise from this image: In the third-floor master bedroom, lightened Douglas fir floors and walls paired with bleached hues in the vintage Vladimir Kagan Crystal armchair, Ligne Roset’s Ruche bed atop a Stark carpet, custom wood nightstands by Casegood, Atollo table lamps

by Vico Magistretti for Oluce and a vintage scalloped deco credenza, all complement the ever-changing palette of Noe Valley and downtown views; above the console are Oskar Zieta’s blown stainless-steel Tafla mirrors; a door on one side of the console leads to the master closet and the other (visible) to the Calacatta marble master bath, which has an enormous rain shower and an Agape tub with city views.

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On the top floor, which opens to a deck with views on one side and the tiered garden on the other, the open-plan living and dining rooms and the kitchen have colorful furnishings and art, including a B&B Italia Tufty-Time sofa and a Knockout side table with a round base by Friends & Founders and Ida Linea Hildebrand, in front of a floating fireplace wall. Facing page: “Blue/Green Vertical,� a diptych by Joey Piziali, hangs beside a Mobile 8 pendant light by Michael Anastassiades.

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Similar materials unify the foyer and rooms on three floors above it: bleached recycled Scandinavian Douglas fir plank flooring from Dinesen meets white painted walls with flush baseboards. Standard door openings were made floor-to-ceiling, and stairwell and hallway walls have openings cut into them “for a more open feeling,” Smith says.

For the interior design, Reed worked on finishes and furnishings in concert with Barbara Turpin-Vickroy from Smith’s office; Reed also accompanied her client to fairs such as Frieze in London and galleries in New York and San Francisco to select art and vintage collectibles.

On the second floor, the walls and ceiling of the media room are covered with blackboard paint and livened with Mah Jong sofas from Roche Bobois upholstered with brightly colored Missoni fabric. Sarah Morris wallpaper from Maharam in the powder room off a marble-backed bar niche echoes a similar pop sensibility, which recurs in several other bathrooms that are lined with mirrors or showy marble. For instance, a bathroom on the same floor in the guest suite facing the street has walls covered with custom black-and-white Bizazza mosaic tiles, installed in a pixelated pattern inspired by a chain link fence.

On the third floor, the owner’s office, located in the rear guest room, has an Oslo sofa and 70/70 desk from Muuto and on the wall, Matthew Palladino’s “Night Ride”; outside, in the rock-walled courtyard with artificial turf, are colorful Adagio swings by Paola Lenti from Dzine.

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Noe Valley views from every floor include this vista from the top-floor deck, which has glass railings framed in thin strips of steel. St Paul’s Catholic Church, where Sister Act, starring Whoopi Goldberg, was filmed, is on the left; Mount Diablo is visible on the right. Outdoor Orlando sofas and Strap side table are by Paola Lenti, from Dzine.

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On the front end of the same floor, the master suite has a reconfigured walk-in closet with custom pulls by Doug Mockett & Company, and a new Calacatta marble bathroom with a rain shower and Agape tub offers unobstructed views of the city. Furniture includes a Ligne Roset bed against a Douglas fir wood-clad wall. The bed is flanked by nightstands fabricated from the same wood. A vintage Vladimir Kagan chair is paired with a Murmansk silver bowl by Memphis designer Ettore Sottsass, and a curved deco dresser has designer Oskar Zieta’s elliptical balloon-like steel Tafla mirrors above it.

Down the hallway, a small nursery was converted into a music room. Its closet was eviscerated to form a cubby, upholstered with green Maharam fabric, where the owner likes to play his guitars. For better acoustics and privacy, Reed asked for built-in pelmets to install drapes.

At the top of the last flight of stairs, Smith added a boxy MDF railing cap, which also provides a display surface in the spare, open-plan living space that has no dividing walls and opens easily to the outside. “You understand the house better up here,” Smith says.

At the front end, the living room, with full-width Fleetwood aluminum sliding doors, extends out onto a deck with glass railings surrounded by planters and river rocks. Its Paola Lenti furnishings and lanterns are all deliberately low so they do not block sight lines from inside the living space, where B&B Italia’s flexible Tufty-Time seating is arranged facing city views. On one side, an old fireplace is reconfigured with a new metal

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Clockwise from this image: In the open-plan living space, the dining area near the head of the stairs, where a glass railing doubles as a shelf, has a stainless steel ceiling panel that mimics the scale of existing skylights, and the understated all-white kitchen with marble backsplashes and a marble island opens to the stepped rear garden by Sculpt; ipe stairs and board-formed concrete walls and decks form several zones in the garden for outdoor cooking, for a spa, and for lounging on Daydream sunbeds by Paola Lenti, and at the every top, a 10-by-10-foot mirrored cube by CCS Architecture contains a James Turrell–esque room with a custom heated bench and an oculus; the rear garden green wall contains baby’s tears and dwarf geraniums from Flora Grubb Gardens, reflected in the mirrored cube’s back wall, which has a narrow doorway cut into it.

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surround, both inset into a white rectangular plane that is angled away from the wood-clad wall behind it. The fireplace appears to be floating, and backlighting reinforces the illusion.

The dining area in the center of the open-plan living space is simply defined by a rectangular mirror-finish stainless-steel panel installed in the ceiling, aligned with a row of existing skylights. “Blue/Green Vertical,” a diptych by Joey Piziali, is paired with a Mobile 8 pendant light by Michael Anastassiasides.

Next to it, the taut modern, all-white kitchen has an island of Carrara marble and oxidized cherry bar stools by Sawkille Co. Artwork in this space includes a framed lithograph by Christoph Rossner from the San Francisco–based Romer Young Gallery on the kitchen counter.

Steps away, Fleetwood doors open to the footbridge leading to the cascading back garden, its many outdoor living areas and the mirrored cube at the far end.

The dramatic cube was intended as a viewing outpost at first but is now used as a retreat for inward reflection. Its entrance is cleverly concealed in back and the cylindrical interior has another voluptuous heated bench to sink into and watch passing clouds through an oculus overhead. Acoustical felt on the ceiling absorbs any ambient sounds, and in that silence any passing thought can be scribbled on the fiberglass walls that are covered with whiteboard paint.

“The owner wanted to create a playful space where ideas could be shared,” Smith says. “We gave him exactly that.” n

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Just off the owner’s office (a former guest room) on the third floor with its yellow Oslo sofa and 70/70 desk, both from Muuto, and Matthew Palladino’s “Night Ride” (not visible) is a rock wall fountain inherited from the previous owners. Sculpt enhanced it with a stone bench bordering a koi pond at its base and, atop fake turf, a heated Helios lounge chair from Galanter & Jones. Hot pink Adagio swings by Paola Lenti, from Dzine, are suspended from the footbridge leading from the fourth-floor kitchen to the tiered back garden.

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POINT OF

VIEW

A CREATIVE COUPLE’S SAUSALITO HOUSE HAS ONE OVERRIDING DESIGN FEATURE: THE NATURAL CANVAS OF THE MARIN LANDSCAPE.

BY E VA HAG B E RG FI S H E R P H OTOG R AP H S BY B R U CE DAM O NTE

is blowing by, the trees are moving, I have the water with boats going around,” Molly West says. “This is our live canvas.”

The bookbinder is talking about her Sausalito house, which she and her husband, Chuck Slaughter, commissioned architect Peter Pfau to build on a lot right next door to their old house seven years ago. Because of the liveliness outside, the owners wanted to “keep everything else a little serene and quiet,” Molly says, describing how in this house, so much of the art — the creative direction, if you will — comes from nature.

The house is perched on the edge of a hillside — from the road, its facade is virtually imperceptible, striations of wood fading into foliage, a setback from the street giving it a sense of privacy. The house faces the waterfront and from that vantage point, levels of wood and glass trip down the hillside, offering a way of reading the house in levels — main floor for everyone; upstairs for the parents; downstairs for the kids. Inside, a family of five — Molly, Chuck and their three sons — make do with a minimalist yet luxuriously detailed space outfitted, as Molly points out, with the detritus of real life: the occasional lacrosse stick, Magic the Gathering card, or hand-bound sketchbook produced by Molly in her in-home studio.

“We wanted the space to be able to evolve and grow over time with the changing needs of all of us in the house,” Molly says. The home has seen change since its construction — three small children have grown into three larger children; Molly’s focus has shifted from bookbinding into a combination of creativity and parenting; and Chuck, who received a bachelor’s degree in architecture, is always adapting as an entrepreneur.

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“RIGHT NOW I’M LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW; THE FOG

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Opposite from top: A horizontal motif extends the sense of motion and expanse on this deck overlooking the water; a massive door swings into the entry courtyard, nestled between two panes of glass; this combination of transparency, openness and material heaviness is repeated throughout the house. This image: The clients wanted an open and structurally transparent feel, visible here in a view of the living room, kitchen and second-floor catwalk. Warm wooden beams interact with crisp steel structural elements to create a spare yet cozy look.

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This image: In the street-floor living area, wide-board wood floors, crisply detailed wood-and-metal stairs, and a repeat of the cadence of brackets on the ceiling create a sense of lively clarity that appears throughout the project. Pale floors and rich ceilings create two visual planes that provide shelter and grounding from the nearby outside. Opposite: Layers of glass offer framed views of the living canvas of the bay.

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Despite knowing and treasuring the autonomy of working for themselves, they found they could work seamlessly with architect Peter Pfau (of San Francisco–based architecture firm Pfau Long) and project architect Kerstin Fischer.

“They were really thoughtful collaborators,” the architect says of the couple. The house “took shape between our sensibilities.” Pfau wasn’t interested in any formal agenda, unlike some architects who use a client’s house as a springboard to explore their own interests; rather, he was interested in exploring what he calls an “experiential agenda.” How can a house accommodate the reality of a family living there — lacrosse sticks and all — and still be, as he says, “beautiful and warm and compelling”?

The solution lay in color, texture and the sensuality of the materials. Chuck lists just some of the elements used — wide-board wood floors; reclaimed walnut cabinetry; wool carpeting; recycled materials — all part of what he calls a “very tactile natural palette.” Another creative solution was use of marble in the kitchen and bathroom, something Molly initially balked at, not wanting to deal with the maintenance.

After rounds of discussion, the three decided to not only go with the marble but fully embrace its limitations. And so lemons have dripped onto the kitchen countertop and bath products have splashed onto the bathroom marble, and all of it has created a patina and a look of true livability.

The house has transformed as the children have grown.

Molly says they now do their homework in her home studio, a sign not only of how comfortable the family feels together in this area, but also of how well-designed the airy space is. The house has its own internal logic: Chuck is fond of the structural rhythm, where each vertical element — inside

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This spread: An angular sectional sofa offers vantage points outside or toward the television, depending on time of day and the clients’ moods.

The window details include a sliding door on the bay-facing side and operable windows facing the woods. Sustainable wool carpeting and reclaimed walnut cabinetry are part of what add to the house’s emphasis on sustainability, something the owners felt was extremely important.

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This image: Molly West’s bookbinding studio, designed as a refuge for her but that has since become the children’s favorite place to settle down for homework, perches in a corner of the house, with one side facing the expanse of the bay, the other focused on sunlight-dappled trees. The mix of exterior materiality and interior detail makes for an ideal creative studio that often becomes the heart of the house. Opposite from top: In the master bedroom, sustainable wool carpeting meets glass to create a feeling of a warm and cozy treehouse; stone floors meet stone walls meet windows meet warm wood ceiling paneling in the master bath, complete with a massive curved soaking tub that adds a distinctive shape to the clean lines appearing throughout the house.

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and outside — is separated from its neighbor by a span of 3.5 feet, as well as the clarity of the all-glass waterfront view. On both interior and exterior, four levels blend into one another, with a second-floor catwalk overhanging the living room and one outdoor deck leading with a finely detailed staircase to another.

Chuck’s brother is the artist Tom Slaughter, whose vivid work can be found on various walls throughout the house.

Pfau admits that art and its placement was an ongoing conversation point but says he and the couple all agreed on one principle: truly keeping the visual emphasis on what’s outside the windows. “We all love waking up and seeing the changing landscape throughout the day,” Chuck says. “It’s so much about the view.” n S PAC E S W I N T E R / S P R I N G 2 0 1 7

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The skyrocketing cost of rent

has created an exodus — or expulsion — of artists from San Francisco to the East Bay that hasn’t been stemmed for nearly two decades now.

However, painter Christopher Brown, whose reputation as an artist blossomed in the Bay Area during the mid-1980s, was one of the lucky ones who years ago chose Oakland (when he was a graduate student at UC Davis) and later Berkeley, where he has lived and worked for three decades.

Brown presciently seized the opportunity to partner with fellow artist Catherine Alden, a sculptor, to build his home and studio in an industrial section of Berkeley called Ocean View.

Ceramicist Peter Voulkos worked on his sculptures in a loft close by, but the area was otherwise desolate; today’s vibrant shops, galleries and restaurants on nearby Fourth Street would have been inconceivable.

“Catherine had purchased an empty lot and we designed a pair of condominiums together,” Brown says. “It was easy. I gave my drawings to an architect who made it buildable.”

Brown had been teaching at UC Berkeley and had saved enough not only to pay for his half of the 6,000-square-foot property but also the construction costs, which all came to an affordable $350,000.

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A Painter’s Place

The two-story 5,500-square-foot live/work wood-frame building they created suited them perfectly. Their asymmetrical units were conjoined and had two floors each, “but I had more of the top floor because I needed light and she needed most of the stable ground floor for her sculptures,” Brown says.

The industrial zoning allowed leeway in choice of materials, and low-maintenance corrugated galvanized-steel cladding for the exterior was a top pick — well ahead of the current vogue — because “steel was cheap then, and it was beautiful,” Brown says. To complement it, the front door was painted a cheerful red.

They also kept interior details basic until they could afford improvements. Plywood floors were eventually covered with spruce planks and, to save money, Brown built himself much-needed kitchen cabinets and shelving for books.

His roughly square-shaped main floor upstairs was divided equally for living and working.

“Both sections were about 20 by 40 feet on each side of the stairs coming up from my street-level 500-square-foot storage space,” Brown says. A kitchen and small living space with a loft bedroom took up one side, and,

FIGURATIVE ARTIST CHRISTOPHER BROWN SKETCHED HIMSELF A DREAM HOME AND THEN BUILT IT.

BY Z AH I D SAR DAR P H OTOG R AP H S BY CE SAR R U B IO

In what was originally designed as his painting studio with high clerestory windows and ribbon skylights, Bay Area artist Christopher Brown now has a home office that sometimes doubles as a party space. A corner slit window was created to allow the artist to slip stretched canvases, on their way to galleries, exhibitions or clients, directly onto a waiting truck.

Two self-revelatory oil canvases he has kept are “Me and Marie,” 2005, a pastoral self-portrait with a former girlfriend, and “Cat Listening to the Radio,” 1996, derived from a USA Today advertisement, of a cartoonish cat that he painted during an extended stay in New York. The carpet in the painting resembles the Turkish carpet from Woven Legends on the birch wood floor.

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In the center of the former studio, which has been halved by a new partition wall, is a custom dining table surrounded by woven cane and steel office chairs that resemble cantilevered Cesca midcentury chairs; the tubular-chrome-steel-and-leather Wassily chairs are originals by Marcel Breuer for Knoll. Artwork on the table includes a slumped ceramic pitcher by Clayton Bailey and an octagonal metal-mesh piece

by Peter Rosenfeld. A hinged wall-size door closes off the room and Brown uses an arched man-door cut into the movable wall — inspired by doors in Morocco — to go in an out of the space during winter months when he shuts off the high-ceilinged space to save heat. In the living room, visible in the background is Brown’s untitled blue and yellow gouache painting on paper, 2002, above bookshelves he built. The red S PAC E S W I N T E R / S P R sofa I N G is 2 0from 1 7 85 leather-covered DWR.

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left of the stairs, the painting studio — where Brown worked on his bestknown images inspired by Civil War themes and other historic material such as the Gettysburg Address, JFK’s assassination and footage from the silent film Battleship Potemkin — was an 18-foot-high gabled loft space with translucent skylights, large clerestory windows on the north side for even light, and a windowless west wall against which he liked to lean large canvases. A tall, narrow window cut into a corner of the east wall allowed the artist to slip finished works out onto delivery trucks headed to galleries.

Now that Brown has a separate studio at another location in Berkeley where he paints every day, a section of the home studio has been absorbed into the living space. The rest remains as it was, serving as an office and a gallery for large paintings he has saved for himself.

“For many years this home studio sat empty and I used it only as a drawing space,” the prolific artist recalls. With the original dividing wall between it and the living area gone, Brown considered adding a new partition to separate the cavernous gallery from the enlarged living room — mainly to keep heat contained — but decided instead on an alternative: a hinged wall that could be moved at will.

“I did not want a fixed wall there because I had become fond of the open space. As it happened, I had just been to Morocco, where large gates have smaller arched doors within them for one person to pass through, and I copied that,” Brown says. “I can close off the studio room when I want, and when I need to go in there, I just use the small door.”

The wall/gate has an ingenious hinge crafted by steel smith Larry Brown with an angled fin and a roller on the underside to help support its weight.

While the cozy living space holds an ever-changing collage — of books, a collection of baseball mitts, old and new artworks by Brown as well as from friends and students, objects he’s collected from local galleries, and furniture he has either built or gathered, including a table and chairs he used as a child in his parents’ home — the bright studio/gallery is still sparse.

“I did like having my studio in the house,” he muses. “It was nice when I stopped working each day that I could return to it immediately the next morning to review my work. That’s why I may paint here again.”

For the moment, it has a large Persian rug and a long dining table, which Brown originally built for rolling out canvases, that now doubles as a desk. On the walls at each end of the table are large canvas self-portraits from the late ’90s when he lived briefly in New York. “One is conventional and figurative, and the other is more playful and cartoonish,” he says.

Nonetheless, the broad-brush painterly style links the pieces to works by Bay Area Figurative movement artists David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn, all artists who influenced Brown.

“I was always a figurative painter,” Brown says. “It started with my Midwestern roots in Ohio. In Chicago, Illinois, where I went to university, there is a long tradition of figurative painting. People are drawn to figures because they are accessible and recognizable.”

At art school in Davis, Brown had painters Wayne Thiebaud and Roy De Forest and sculptors Robert Arneson and Manuel Neri as mentors.

“Artist Jim Melchert was my colleague at Berkeley, where I taught until 1994,” he adds.

“There was a moment when those great artists converged,” Brown says.

“And, I just happened to be in this area.” n

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Brown collects books, objects from flea markets, and artwork by students and friends as well as sentimental objects. Opposite top: near the kitchen, a yellow painted wood and plaster figure with an outstretched arm, by Robert Brady, stands near a collection of baseball mitts displayed in a stairwell.

Opposite bottom: In the older section of the living area are more books, a gouache painting on paper, “Espaliering the Pear Tree”, 2002, a vintage cherrywood dining table and arrow-back dining chairs from Ohio are family heirlooms he used as a child.

This page: Near a vintage wood and fabric sofa, a multicolored etching of feet by Alex Katz, issued

by Crown Point Press, is placed next to flea market finds; it rests on a blond wood table by artist Allan Adams, 1982, against the new partition wall. In the background, near a dog-alcove is a hand-carved post by Oakland artist John Abduljami. Stairs lead up to the artist’s loft bedroom.

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ARCHITECTURAL ALCHEMY

WITH SMOKED MIRRORS, ARCHITECT WILLIAM DUFF TRANSFORMED A MODEST BARN IN NAPA INTO A LUMINOUS SCULPTURE.

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BY R E E D WR I G HT P H OTOG R AP H S BY MAT TH E W M I LLMAN

A barn that stood on art collectors Cindy and Howard Rachofsky’s Napa Valley vineyard for a century was moved recently, after they acquired the 7-acre property to spend summers away from Dallas, where they live. In its new location, it serves as an airy entertainment pavilion. Although the original barn, intended for drying hay, was left intact with light and air passing through its slatted structure, architect William Duff of San Francisco provided it with a new concrete plinth that allows outdoor dining terraces around it. Inside, a dining area for smaller parties is centered between two new, mirrored cabins that infinitely reflect the bronze trestle and wood-top table

by BDDW; one cabin contains a service kitchen and the other a gym.

Views ricocheting in the interior include the surrounding vineyards, an organic garden and other farmhouse buildings on the property.

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When the kitchen cabin’s mirrored wall slides back, it reveals a bleached oak wood-clad service bar, which is used during parties.

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A W E L L- D E S I G N E D B U I L D I N G can well be viewed as art, and one San Francisco architect has found a way to combine art and architecture to bring out the best of both. “I like to explore the inherent qualities of carefully edited materials for a more holistic architecture,” William Duff says.

In doing so, Duff, also the board chair at Sonoma’s di Rosa art gallery and grounds, has become a proponent of unusual residential and commercial modern projects that close the gap between design and art.

Recently, he restored what he calls a “quintessential gabled barn,” a century old, in the Napa Valley for noted contemporary art collectors and philanthropists Cindy and Howard Rachofsky. Their 10,000-square-foot Richard Meier–designed mansion in Dallas is where much of their lauded art collection that has been promised to the Dallas Art Museum resides year round, but the Rachofskys like to spend summers (and reportedly New Year’s Eve) out west, where the weather is clement near the coast.

For their seven-acre California outpost, amid a vineyard and a large organic vegetable garden dotted with some of their burgeoning collection, including sculpture by the likes of British sculptor Richard Long and Korean designer Lee Hun Chung, they asked for a modest dining pavilion, within sight of the main house but closer to the vines, where they could entertain guests.

Requiring only a minimalist aesthetic and the flexibility to use the party venue for large or small gatherings, they opted for a slatted wood barn that could be thrown open or kept closed depending on the crowd size and the weather.

Duff relocated the historic archetypal building to its current site, completely restored it and inserted two rectangular, steelframed, mirror-clad pavilions inside. One is a state-of-the-art catering kitchen and the other an exercise gym.

The barn is now literally and figuratively a “reflector of its surroundings,” the architect says. “The guiding principle for this project was light.”

The mirrored pavilions are spaced far enough apart to make room between them for a very large dining table by New York’s BDDW. Oversize hollow fiberglass lanterns by Alan Knight hover overhead, creating a focal point for the mostly muted palette of grays inside, including bleached rift-sawn oak for the service bar (hidden behind sliding doors

Top: Guests are treated to site-specific works scattered throughout the property, landscaped by Steve Arns, including a circular work of concrete and white pebbles by Jacob Kassay and a ceramic sculpture by Lee Hun Chung. Above: Three fiberglass and LED pendant lanterns designed by Alan Knight are repeated infinitely in the opposing mirrored cabins. With its interior lights out, the gym, shown here, looks identical to the kitchen cabin.

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This image: Exercise balls are visible in the gym cabin, where two-way mirrored walls become transparent when a light is switched on inside. Oppsite: Ribbons of sunlight that leak into the barn create a rhythmic pattern on the dark-stained concrete floor, but at certain times of day when angled light ricochets off the mirrors, the results are more expressionistic.

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when not in use) and new stained wood rafters that were added in conjunction with the steel structure to shore up the metal roof.

In that incandescent setting, and thanks to the opposing reflective walls, even an intimate gathering looks like a sizable, colorful party, and diners can enjoy ricocheted views of gardens and vineyards in every direction.

The gym, clad in two-way mirrors (transparent from the darkened side), is as reflective as its twin pavilion, yet allows users inside it to look out at views during the day; at night it becomes a kind of see-through lantern when lighted inside.

The barn, faithful to its original design, with gaps between the siding that once allowed light and air in for livestock and drying hay, now has a new board-formed concrete foundation, to elevate it above the surrounding vines. Light streams in through the structure’s wooden slats, forming expressionistic patterns on the new dark-stained polished floors, and when the barn doors are rolled back, the gleaming smoked mirrors reflect the view.

In an effortlessly sculptural way, this reimagined barn engages the historic, ecological and formal character of its surroundings while poetically integrating patterns, light and views.

“Given the constraints an architect needs to contend with, it’s challenging to be artful with buildings,” Duff says, but this one “is as close to art as any building I’ve ever done.” n

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Epoch Collection A PAINTER’S PRIZED COLLECTION OF BAROQUE RELICS OFFERS GRAND GESTURES AT EVERY TURN INSIDE THIS LIGHT-FILLED SAN RAFAEL HOME.

BY SAR AH LY N CH P H OTOG R AP H S BY DAVI D D U N C AN LIVI N G STO N

IN RENAISSANCE PAINTING ,

The entrance to the home of Linda Cosgrove and Perry Burr is packed with treasures, including a pair of 17th century papier-mâché kneeling figures displayed on the staircase landing. Opposite: Two main vignettes in the foyer feature an early Michoacan terra-cotta urn and an 18th-century Mexican cupola made from gilt wood and vellum.

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chiaroscuro is the dramatic contrast of dark and light. For those who know her, that word could also be used to describe the artist Linda Cosgrove.

A former model, the statuesque Cosgrove is a lighthearted character who paints dark scenes reminiscent of Caravaggio — think illuminated headless saints and unwinged angels set against a mysteriously deep black background. With a quick, honest laugh, she leads guests through her home pointing out 18th-century reliquaries (that may contain vestiges of saintly remains) and gilded Italian candle prickets, while sharing funny anecdotes about family trips to Italy and the trials of hauling home her finds.

Located on a tree-lined street in the Dominican neighborhood, Cosgrove’s Spanish Colonial home features a set of worn wooden front doors brought back from Mexico. Beyond these doors, the large foyer is marked by a series of tableaux designed from ornate architectural pieces and gilded mirrors along with doll-like saint figures and other religious relics. Looking down from the staircase landing are a life-size pair of kneeling figures in their original 17th-century dresses. In the adjacent living room and, every surface is arranged with a curated display of baroque treasures. And in the dining room, an array of Venetian glass and china is paired with

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The traditional architecture and white furnishings in the living room set the stage for Cosgrove’s collection of gilded rococo artifacts, including a 17th-century Italian framed mirror and an 18th-century carved wood chest. Above: Cosgrove’s favorite pieces may be her various reliquary — elaborately carved statues designed for an altar and containing the bones, clothing or other relics of a saint. The pair of 18th-century painted Roman busts, flanking the doorway to the sunroom, came from the Max Fleischer estate.

Mexican milagros. The overall effect is surprisingly colorful, despite the fact that almost everything is either gold or white.

“People come in here and see all this stuff and they think we must be very religious,” says Cosgrove of the home she and her husband, Perry Burr, have shared for nearly 20 years.

“But I am not religious at all, not in the traditional sense. I just think of it as incredibly beautiful handmade art, which just so happens to have been commissioned by the Catholic Church because that was the biggest patron in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.”

For years, Cosgrove has been collecting decorative architectural remnants and relics from Mexico, Latin America and Europe. What began as a curiosity about early Italian crèche figures (traditionally created at Christmastime for an elaborate nativity scene) eventually spiraled into a collection of larger pieces. A gilded vargueno (writing desk) from Spain stands in the dining room, a wrought-iron gate from Mexico takes up an entire wall in the living room, a pair of seven-foot fluted columns from Mexico flank a doorway, and Cosgrove’s treasured remnants from Italy abound.

“I definitely went through a French rococo phase,” Cosgrove says, “but much of it was too perfect, too fussy for me. I gravitate toward the earlier Italianate hand-worked objects because they have an authenticity to them. I prefer the cruder works. In fact, if I could afford it, I’d have Roman stuff all over the place.”

To Cosgrove, it’s not about the pedigree as much as how S PAC E S W I N T E R / S P R I N G 2 0 1 7

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The glass dining table is set with a combination of mismatched Venetian glass and giltwood candlesticks surrounding an 18th-century Italian carved wood shell. On the console, a pair of Italian arm-shaped reliquary are displayed. Opposite: Each place setting is rich with history; this one features one-of-a-kind glass and china along with a silver salt cellar.

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an object inspires her. As in the artist’s view of her own paintings, which lean in overlapping stacks against the walls, nothing is ever too precious. Despite her clear appreciation for these pricy collectibles’ heritage, she has a surprisingly casual relationship with the pieces she has amassed at far-off flea markets and carefully transported home. As she offers her nickel tour, she picks up an 18th-century bishop’s staff and hands it over to touch. And according to Burr, Cosgrove rearranges the various vignettes almost daily.

“This stuff is part and parcel of what she uses as inspiration for her painting, and she paints every day,” he says.

“She takes the Old Master style of painting and makes it contemporary and often surreal. So the culture and the history of these objects are part of her work, but so are the ever-changing compositions.”

It was a stint in Mexico City in the early 1990s that had the greatest impact on Cosgrove’s aesthetic. They couple lived there with their young daughter, Olivia, while Burr worked as a landscape architect on a large-scale project. The family shared an apartment near the Zona Rosa, which at the time held a seedy mix of sex shops and antique stores. At the same time, she began painting in the daylight (during Olivia’s nap time) rather than late at night, discovering a new ability to use the brush to create delicate, realistic lines and patterns.

“It was like the sweet mystery of life revealed. I could finally paint like I’d always wanted to,” Cosgrove says. “We were in Mexico, traveling to dusty little towns where the most beautiful places were the cathedrals and the government buildings and I started collecting things that inspired me — santos and retablos. Those themes, which happen to be religious, carried over when we started traveling to Latin America and Europe.”

It was 2000 when Cosgrove and her family moved to Marin and settled into this gracious 1905 house. Though it was already fully renovated, they updated it little by little over the years, swapping out large windows for French doors throughout and adding patios and decks to connect the main home to Cosgrove’s small painting studio. But the greatest addition has been the ever-changing display of extraordinary crumbling objects that exists amid an ordinary life filled with family photos, a table set for dinner, a proud display of a child’s sculpture. Add to that Cosgrove’s own intense paintings, and it’s the sublime combination of mysterious darkness and pure light. n

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Top left: While some of Cosgrove’s pieces are beautifully worn, the 18th-century Spanish vargueno in the dining room appears in top condition. Bottom left: Venetian glassware collected over many trips to Italy is grouped in and above a vitrine in the dining room.

Opposite: Though the overall effect is European, this sunroom vignette shows off a pre-Columbian figurative terra-cotta vessel along with many works collected from Cosgrove and Burr’s travels to Latin America.

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An art piece, in the form of a stone and gravel entry path designed by Topher Delaney, is a love poem in Braille. Surface Design extended the path with staggered concrete pavers coursing through a river rock swale (intended to manage storm water) 102 WbyI Nbamboo T E R / S Pthickets.

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PLAYING TO

THE GALLERY

FUN INFUSES THIS GARDEN OF PATHWAYS, RAMPS AND MOUNDS THAT DOUBLES AS LAND ART AND EXHIBITION SPACE FOR SCULPTURE.

BY R E E D WR I G HT P H OTOG R AP H S BY MAR IO N B R E N N E R

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The dining room’s garage door opens to a sculptural, faceted steel-and-ipe deck by Surface Design; It stops short of Delaney’s Braille path and resumes its undulating trajectory on the path’s other side.

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Stuart and Gina Peterson approached landscape architects James Lord and Roderick Wyllie of the San Francisco firm Surfacedesign, Inc. for an unorthodox hilltop garden to mesh well with their modern, art-filled home.

“The journey through the garden was to be as important as the destinations within it,” Lord says.

Now, less than half an hour across the bay from San Francisco’s Crissy Field, where the Petersons helped fund an SFMOMA off-site exhibition of Mark di Suvero’s steel sculptures, the couple’s rectangular five-acre “park” at home is also one where walking, running, jumping, sliding and playing hide-and-seek amid wild grasses and art are all possible.

Although they wanted a garden that echoed the whimsy of their art collection, the Petersons also desired a place for their two boys and little daughter to play in. European play structures with slides and swings were one implemented solution, but in addition the designers offered more imaginative encounters with the land.

So, “on the south side of the garden, which was sheltered by the house, we created intimate, dense areas to lose oneself in,” Wyllie says.

They formed paths that are telescopic corridors to view art and that also link the entry garden on the west end to the rest of the undulating site that stretches eastward.

Just inside the pivoting entry gate, a straight path, conceived by artist and landscape architect Topher Delaney and left undisturbed, has stepping-stones that spell out a love poem by English poet Christopher Marlowe in Braille.

Midway up the path, a new ipe deck extends the wood floor of the dining room (when its large aluminum-and-glass garage door is rolled open) to the outdoors; it then ramps down, its increasingly faceted form resembling origami, and stops short of the paved path before hopping to the other side. This hyphenated deck is a formal threshold to the garden and also a climbing and sliding zone instantly favored by the children, two of whom were kindergartners when it was installed.

Beyond it, the path transitions into a newer walkway that is covered with long rectangular cement pavers laid in a staggered pattern; it wends past existing magnolia trees and a newly planted thicket of tall bamboo, interspersed with Japanese maples. This shaded rain garden, bordered by river rock and ferns, is fed by storm water that flows downhill and meanders past an amphitheater composed of a sculpted lawn and repurposed curbstones. It then turns into a beaten path that arcs around a wide grassy clearing graced by “Roundout,” a 2005 aluminum rabbit-like sculpture

by Travis Constance that is ensconced within native grasses, including feathery yellow Nasella tenuissima.

“By choreographing a spatial sequence, you form an experience.

When you go through a tall, narrow opening into a horizontal space, it is like swimming, and like slicing through water before spreading your arms,” Lord says.

As it happens, the open lawn slopes northward and covers four round mounds that took the place of an old swimming pool that had collapsed and was torn out. These artificial hills atop the repaired site mimic the open, rolling landscape in the distance, helping to frame views of the Marin hills and the San Francisco Bay. “They look beautiful, but when you look closely, they are all about fun.

They are play structures,” Lord says.

Built into one of the manmade hills is a ground trampoline for the children to jump on. Another, “Rabbit Hole Hill,” is riddled with holes

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ABOUT EIGHT YEARS AGO , Tiburon art collectors

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A bamboo forest leads to a clearing with grassy mounds and a meadow of wild grasses where Travis Constance’s 2005 sculpture, “Roundout,” springs up like a giant aluminum rabbit.

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Clipped hedges add a kind of formality to a meandering paved pathway, as well as spots for displaying art alongside the house. Mounded retaining hills on the edge of the garden are actually play structures, including one with an embedded trampoline. Old curbstones laid as steps are an informal amphitheater between the house and the grassy areas surrounding old oak trees.

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large enough for golf balls to fall in, funnel through and emerge randomly in the garden. On a third mound Lord wanted a water bed–like balloon in the ground camouflaged by sod, but the idea was scratched as too difficult to maintain. Instead, a globular hobbit-size playhouse with a roof of marine-grade plywood slats is yet another hill, and it’s one the children can enter.

Although Surfacedesign’s work often involves large airport and institutional gardens across the globe, including in lush New Zealand and arid Saudi Arabia, “nearly half our work is residential. That’s because we are interested in dynamic spatial experiences, and such gardens can be asymmetrical and more expressionistic,” Wyllie says. “This one is a carefully considered mash-up of many influences.”

While the long views down each of the pathways reflect French perspectival techniques, a maze of hedges of lavenders and salvia that snakes back and forth to form enclosures for displaying sculptures, just west of the amphitheater, was inspired by English knot gardens. The designers also borrowed from serene Japanese gardens for areas that “look inward, toward the ground, and land art by artists Michal Heizer and James Turrell to make those playful forms out of the earth,” Wyllie says.

To the owners’ delight, these uncommon wonders captivate the children more than their slides and swings do. “According to Gina, the kids love to run and play in the garden and clamber on top of the earth forms and conjure up their own worlds,” Wyllie says. “They like to use their imaginations.” n S PAC E S W I N T E R / S P R I N G 2 0 1 7

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P O R T FO L I O

BY Z A H I D S A R DA R

SHADOW PLAY This San Francisco sculptor has found a way to make something positive from the remains of the city’s construction boom.

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Andy Vogt, 46, who was educated as a multimedia artist at Carnegie Mellon University and worked as an architectural model maker and set builder in the Bay Area, now regularly checks the contents of trash bins.

In doing that, he has a goal. He’s looking for discarded Victorian- and Edwardian-era hardwood lath that was used as backing for plaster walls.

About 10 years ago when Vogt arrived in the Bay Area, a building and remodeling boom was underway and bins were overflowing with such debris.

“I came from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where nothing seemed to change, but in San Francisco that’s all you saw around you. Change. Buildings were disappearing at an alarming rate, and old wood lath was there for the taking,” he says.

With rampant gentrification that has made it impossible for artists to find affordable housing or studio space in the city, Vogt turned his concern into an artistic opportunity. But the material he found also sparked a body of work that ranges from two-dimensional “drawings” and “sketches,” all made of strips of about one-inch-wide lath grouped together, to three-dimensional sculptures and site-specific installations.

“At first, I treated the lath as if it was a drawing medium like a pencil. It had a certain line weight that varied slightly in texture and width depending on the era it was manufactured in. I began to draw with it,” Vogt says.

In the process, the artist took advantage of different shades of color and stains the lath had acquired naturally over time to not just render lines but also indicate light and shade.

“The forms modeled in this way with light and dark wood are sculptural to look at but they are essentially flat,” Vogt says. “My work is sculpture as drawing.” Still working two-dimensionally, with mathematical precision, he lays together strips of lath from his curated collection to form two-dimensional cubes, rectangles, scaffolds and cones that have an Escher-esque quality and seem to jump forward off the surface or recede into it, depending on the angle the objects are viewed from.

SAN FRANCISCO SCULPTOR

COURTESY OF ANDY VOGT

Opposite: “Visible Spectrum,” 2013, 52 by 29 inches in diameter, is among the few truly three-dimensional pieces Vogt creates using salvaged wood lath. From top to bottom are other works that play with shadows: “El Cuadrado,” 2016, 18 by 37 inches of salvaged wood lath; “Altered Mirror,” 2013, 30-by-65-inch acrylic mirror that is spotlit; “Untitled (09092015),” 2015, 30-by-40-inch light-oxidized pigment on cotton; and “Non Obj Box,” 2016, 61.5 by 166 inches made of salvaged wood lath.

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Above: “V Trench,” 2015, 14 feet by 44 inches, is made of salvaged wood lath.

Left: “Shadeshape 3,” 2011, 71-by-1.5-inch salvaged wood lath, casts shadows that are also used to create light-oxidized pigment pieces on cotton.

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Relatively recently, as a resident artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts and in his own studio in the Balboa Park neighborhood, Vogt has also explored ways to make three-dimensional objects and scaffolds that look like buildings just taking shape or being dismantled. They cast real shadows on a wall. “The shadows are also a drawing medium now,” Vogt says.

For one 2012 piece called “Altered Mirror,” he selectively stripped the silvered backing off an acrylic mirror so that when a light shines through the altered plane, it creates light “shadows” or patterns of light on the wall.

Prompted by an outdoor installation he did for the Museum of Craft and Design in the Dogpatch neighborhood, Vogt now sometimes builds latticed objects and places them in the sun on stretched fabric treated with light-sensitive dye, to fix the cast shadows onto the dyed fabric. These sun prints harken back to Anna Atkins’ cyanotype blueprints and latter-day Laszlo Moholy-Nagy darkroom photograms of the Bauhaus school in Germany; in Vogt’s versions, the sculptures’ shadows prevent the dye from adhering to the fabric, and the shadow areas remain white or lighter than the rest of the surface, which has been exposed to sunlight.

Vogt’s site-specific wall works include a mural for South Park Commons, a tech incubator. Cast-concrete tiles, formed with lath strips that remain impressed in the surface of the tile-like shadows, are new designs that can be installed outdoors.

All the works Vogt creates with lath represent upheaval and inevitable changes in the built landscape, which, “no matter how ephemeral it is, forms a palimpsest,” he says. “Those are my themes,” Vogt adds. “My structures are also transitory and merely shadows at play.” n Prices from $1,000 to $15,000; andyvogt.com

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BY R E E D W R I G H T

M A K E OV E R

A REAL TRANSFORMATION With a few elegant moves, Sausalito designer Martin Kobus gave a tired Belvedere kitchen and living space a much-needed face-lift.

DAVID DUNCAN LIVINGSTON

A B O U T A Y E A R AG O ,

Julie Wainwright, the founder and head of The RealReal, an online luxury consignment art and fashion store, asked Sausalito interior designer Martin Kobus to update the middle floor of her trilevel midcentury modern home in Belvedere. It included a foyer and living room that guests saw first, a conventional kitchen on one side and a somewhat cramped dining room on the other.

Kobus happens to be Dutch with a penchant for European-style modernism. He had cleared out extraneous walls at his own formerly dark house by the water on Corinthian Island, and he’d raised ceilings to provide a loft-like living room with white walls for art and big picture windows. He suggested similar improvements.

To provide a sense of space, he and his client decided to remove a partition wall between the

Inset: The original living room had dark floors and a conventional fireplace. In the new space, Kobus bleached the floors, painted the walls a pale gray, and supplied new custom furnishings, and the tour de force is a new inset fireplace with a dark tile surround that makes the structure seem much larger than it is. The deck beyond the French windows has new glass railings in lieu of wood.

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M A K E OV E R

Inset: The old kitchen with standard-issue cabinets and the original back door that leads to a side yard.

Images on top show the new kitchen with an eat-in counter and symmetrical wall cabinets. Another window on the left (not seen) matches the back door. The central island also contains storage. And with the wall between the kitchen and living space removed, the area now has a view of the bay across the living space, which has low furnishings.

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kitchen and the living room, whose French doors open onto a cantilevered deck that received new clear glass railings. Now, from several vantage points in the kitchen, “Julie can look across the living room at unobstructed views of Belvedere Cove,” the designer says.

The new kitchen, similar to one Kobus created for the 2016 San Francisco Decorator Showcase, incorporates appliances from Thermador, Miele and Viking. Its central white Neolith-covered food preparation island has a protruding fin made of laminated walnut wood and resin that forms an L-shaped dining counter.

Flanking the kitchen’s new back galley counter an old window on the left and a back door on the right became symmetrical floorto-ceiling clear glass openings that look onto a shallow back patio. The new fenestration adds to the illusion of an ample rear garden; increased daylight also means that a pendant light from Stickbulb is switched on only at night. On the south side of the kitchen, a concealed pocket door can close off the dining room during dinner parties but new floor-to-ceiling windows make the room feel capacious.

To help all three rooms feel even larger, Kobus bleached their oak floors and painted their walls a uniform pale gray-blue to display Wainwright’s vibrant art collection from The RealReal.

In the living room, a traditional hearth and mantel with built-in bookcases on either side were removed and covered by a wallboard fascia; the original fireplace now appears larger, inset into a slightly recessed horizontal channel and tiled with an inch-thick slab of stone-like easycare Neolith porcelain from Spain. Although it takes up more floor space, the boxed fireplace adds contemporary flair to the room. Above it, Andy Warhol’s red “Hammer and Sickle” complements furnishings Kobus designed, including rectilinear cabinets and furniture by local craftsman Chris Tomasi. Seating islands float atop a large silk-and-bamboo-fiber carpet that anchors the elongated room.

Everything is kept low to the ground so as to not obstruct the view. With that move, along with the neutral color palette, Kobus has achieved “our modernist objective, without being fanciful,” Wainwright says. That’s keeping it real. n

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LANDING

BY Z A H I D S A R DA R

An unhampered view of the Sea of Cortez from atop one of Playa de La Paz’s penthouse terraces with a fire pit at the center.

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A RISING TIDE

Overlooking the Sea of Cortez, home to whale sharks, dolphins and sea turtles, the town of La Paz, Mexico, has a distinctive outpost that lifts the architectural bar.

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Jacques Cousteau described the narrow Sea of Cortez, between the Baja California Peninsula and the Mexican mainland, as the world’s aquarium, he wasn’t kidding.

Its azure surface, broken only by gentle waves lapping onto rocky islands that look like giant layer cakes, on a recent visit is suddenly alive with several hundred joyful dolphins.

They leap out of the water, twirl and swim in unison, dive under our skiff and occasionally race in front of us, as if leading me and my companion Jeffrey Curtiss, a real estate developer and de facto boutique hotelier in La Paz, to one of hundreds of coral playgrounds teeming with colorful tropical fish.

“Isn’t this amazing?” Curtiss asks. An English entrepreneur who put his roots down in La Paz a decade ago after he happened to visit his son’s diving school, he still can’t get enough of this paradise.

“This is where I can breathe freely,” he says, recalling his first delirious balmy days away from London’s pollution as a veritable beach bum in nearby Playa Pichilingue. He gorged on chocolate-colored clams, crabs and shrimp at a restaurant under a thatched palapa that has remained unchanged for decades. “It is where the area’s power brokers come to relax,” just a stone’s throw from a modern ferry landing where goods and mainlanders arrive, Curtiss says. He made friends easily because “people are very friendly here and within a few days you feel like a local.”

A few weeks into his self-exile, Curtiss decided to stay.

Although it is southern Baja’s capital, La Paz is laid-back and, true to its name, it is a peaceful backwater with low, unassuming Mission-style buildings, many constructed with cinder blocks.

Its 250,000 workaday residents make the place the antithesis of flashy Cabo, just two hours away on Baja’s southern tip.

In 2003, recognizing La Paz’s unstudied charm, Money magazine dubbed it one of the

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Clockwise from top left: The asymmetrical Mooresque beachside buildings of Playa de La Paz, just outside Baja, Mexico’s capital La Paz, have their own pool for a quick dip with a sea view; one of the local artisans crafting a piece of furniture for the resort residences; a kiosk at one end of the Malecón in La Paz; happy sea lions basking in the sun off Espiritu Santo Island; a dolphin’s-eye view, from the Sea of Cortez, of Playa de La Paz; one of the magnificent layer-cake-like islands floating in the Sea of Cortez; in the historic center of La Paz, stone buildings and squared towers inspired the architecture of Playa de La Paz; El Hongo, a mushroom-shaped rock off Espiritu Santo Island is a symbol of La Paz and is also enshrined in the form of a fountain in the center of Jardin Velasco, La Paz’s main square.

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best places to retire to. However, others had noticed it long before. Novelist John Steinbeck described it in his 1950s book The Log From the Sea of Cortez as a world unto itself; entertainers Desi Arnaz and Bing Crosby and actor Clark Gable liked to party there; singer Engelbert Humperdinck owned a hotel on the outskirts of town called La Posada de Engelbert. It still exists, recently refurbished as a five-star hotel called La Posada. Despite these celebrities, La Paz remains largely ignored by American tourists, perhaps because there are no direct international flights to its airport. It’s a good thing. La Paz’s vibrant Alvaro Obregon boulevard, which parallels the Malecón, a wide three-mile-long promenade skirting the bay, is alive at night with Spanish-speaking families strolling by, young adults coursing into bars, and occasionally in the side streets off the main drag, a mariachi band serenading a bridal party in an elegant courtyard restaurant.

Curtiss embraced all this but not the makeshift nature of some of La Paz’s newest buildings. He wanted a home that would rise above the norm in detail and materials. During the last six years, he began building his dream home on 10 acres adjoining El Caimancito Beach, located midway between Pichilingue and La Paz. Keen to sink deeper roots, he also started a date palm farm and a horse ranch on other properties and has helped fund the Bagel Shop, a bakery and cafe in the center of town.

“Alvaro Obregon boulevard is alive at night with Spanish-speaking families strolling by, young adults coursing into bars, and occasionally a mariachi band serenading a bridal party.”

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“I go there regularly and meet my other expat friends,” Curtiss says, proffering sumptuous smoked salmon bagel sandwiches he brought along for our picnic back on the boat.

Our dolphin encounter was merely the first of myriad others today in this aquatic universe that includes migrating whales, marlin and dorado fish as well as sea lions basking off Espiritu Santo, an uninhabited island northeast of Pichilingue.

Five of the world’s eight species of sea turtles, endangered porpoises, and giant 30-foot-long whale sharks with their signature white spots on

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Some birds are enshrined in local weavings, like the one above, on display near Jardin Velasco.

charcoal-colored backs also call this area home.

I snorkeled gingerly alongside one of these awesome gentle giants as it swam by slowly, sucking up plankton, an arm’s length away.

At sundown, we walked along the wide stretch of beach that borders Curtiss’ aptly named Playa de la Paz enclave and watched the moon rise behind the conjoined white-painted buildings that he has conceived with the help of Guadalajara architect Geraldo Ulate. The 23 residences, with invisible steel and concrete underpinnings to withstand earthquakes, resemble a Moresque Mediterranean village that has grown by accretion.

“I wanted something amazing but also something that belonged here,” Curtiss says. So its handwrought front gate has a sun and moon motif. Arched openings, large floor-to-ceiling windows, trellised roof terraces and sheltered balconies are borrowed from local forms, and all these have views of lush yet drought-resistant gardens surrounding a free-form infinity swimming pool and, just beyond it, the prized sea.

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Some of the Playa’s resort-style indoor/outdoor residences, funded along with two other financial partners, are for sale, and a few are occasionally rented to prospective buyers who, with the help of a concierge, can get a sense of the area and the luxurious, spacious homes.

For instance, a million-dollar one-bedroom residence is as big as a multibedroom home in the Bay Area, at 3,000 square feet. Even larger Playa residences have up to four bedrooms.

The interiors, some by Canadian architect Alex Chapman and others by Paulina Gutierrez of San Jose del Cabo, are modern, with stateof-the-art Viking kitchens, marble bathrooms and beautiful furnishings, some by local craftsmen. A freestanding poolside gym, located close to a bronze anchor sculpture by Octavio Gonzalez, is open all the time. What’s not easily visible are the desalination plant, which makes seawater in Playa’s taps safer than bottled water, and powerful generators that kick in when electricity flags during a storm.

The surrounding desert landscape is dotted with cactus and acacia, yet the browned backdrop of El Mirador hills turns green after the smallest downpour, and that verdure lines the panoramic road from Playa to the center of La Paz.

“Five of the world’s eight species of sea turtles, endangered porpoises, and giant 30-foot-long whale sharks also call this area home.”

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Although Baja has been inhabited for millennia, La Paz is a 16th-century creation fueled in part by pearl fishing. The sea, as with all coastal towns, is still its beating heart. A whale museum reverentially displays a whale skeleton in its side yard, and more of Gonzalez’s sea-inspired bronzes of mermaids, breaching whales and even a manta ray in flight grace the Malecón. Jardin Velasco, a square in the center of town in front of the 1861 Dominican Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Paz, built on the site of an 18th-century Jesuit mission, has a fountain contoured like a mushroom-shaped rock in the Sea of Cortez, a symbolic nod to La Paz’s best asset, the sea.

Curtiss loves all that, he says, but when it comes to new buildings, he wants Playa de la Paz to clear a path that goes “well beyond the box.” playadelapaz.com. n

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BY R E E D W R I G H T

I N B LO O M

SOUTHERN BELLES FROM GARDEN TO TABLE. At Flora Grubb’s San Francisco garden nursery, plants that flower almost year-round include the intriguing Solanum wendlandii, a giant potato vine with curved thorns, large leaves and showy clusters of violet blossoms from May to November, and Grevillea ‘Honey Gem’ and Grevillea ‘Moonlight’, evergreen hybrids with lacy pale-yellow racemes of flowers. These beautiful subtropical types from the Southern Hemisphere, which need sunshine and little water, slow down only in winter. “Grevilleas are well suited to coastal climates but will not take a hard freeze, so you can grow them in California but not too many other

PHOTOGR APHED AT FLOR A GRUBB GARDENS BY CESAR RUBIO

places,” Grubb says. floragrubb.com

Grevillea and Solanum wendlandii complement Umbra Shift’s subtly colored stacking, nesting, lidded Sediment line of stoneware bowls, cups and dishes designed by Dutch design firm Os+Oos. Prices range from $25 to $40. umbrashift.com

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RESOURCES Did you see something you like in one of our feature stories? This handy resource guide will tell you who made the major pieces in our pages, what type of item it is and where to find it. Happy shopping.

Clockwise from this page: For a San Francisco home, CCS Architecture formed a foyer gallery, with a pivoting red front door, in which a framed cast plaster panel, “Still Life With Fruit”

by Matthew Palladino hangs above a bench that contains slippers for guests; the charred cedar exterior is complemented with a tall entry porch lined with back-painted red glass; a bleached Douglas fir wood staircase, with side walls perforated for display niches, goes from the foyer to the third floor, interrupted only by a second-floor landing.

IN A FAST-PACED DIGITAL WORLD,

A SAN FRANCISCO HIDEOUT, WHOSE SPARE, ART-FILLED INTERIOR OPENS TO SPECTACULAR VIEWS, A TIERED GARDEN AND DECKS, IS DESIGNED FOR LIVING INSIDE AND OUT.

PHOTO CREDIT

outside the box

disruption is a virtue. So although this 1930s house in San Francisco’s verdant Glen Park area had been extensively remodeled in 2012, its new owner, a 28-year-old tech entrepreneur, wanted to make further changes.

The four-story, 4,000-square-foot building on a steep up-sloping hillside had four bedrooms, a media room, several bathrooms, a panoramic view of the city and bay, and easy access to Silicon Valley. But its unfinished backyard, gray stucco exterior, gray-stained oak floors, walnut casework and hemmed-in hallways were all unremarkable.

To put his stamp on what is the very first home he has called his own, the young owner enlisted the help of Akemi Tamaribuchi Reed, his former hairstylist, who is now his design touchstone.

“My role is very atypical,” Reed, who heads a lifestyle consultancy firm called Subject to Change, explains.

The backyard, only accessible via a footbridge off the fourth-floor living spaces, was a priority, so, in 2013, Reed got landscape designers John and Danielle Steuernagel to work on it. Then came architect Cass Calder Smith, whose New York/San Francisco–based firm CCS Architecture was hired to rethink the flooring and the staircase, which rises in a straight line between the foyer and the third floor before it switches back to go up to the fourth floor. Before long, the project scope grew to include the interiors and the facade.

Working alongside each other, both teams dovetailed their design expertise to craft a seamless indoor/outdoor living space.

Steuernagel, who grew up in New Jersey with a father in the flower nursery business, started the San Francisco landscape firm Sculpt in 2003.

Many unique gardens ensued, including one for a blind man, but accesswise, none as challenging as the one in Glen Park.

The Sculpt team easily added a koi pond and a heated Helios bench

by Galanter & Jones in an existing open-to-sky grotto with a waterfall fountain off a rear guest room on the third floor.

The rest of the 100-foot-deep tiered yard, previously shored up by stacked rubble, took nearly two years to redo with new concrete retaining walls and terraces. Now, the footbridge leads to a dining patio with a fire pit and an outdoor kitchen; farther uphill are a sunken stainless steel hot tub and an outdoor shower, an artificial lawn with lounge chairs and bleachers and, at the very top, a plinth for an observation shed.

CCS, led by project architect Bjorn Steudte, later transformed the shed into a sculptural 10-by-10-foot mirrored cube, with a cylindrical interior that contains an oculus inspired by artist James Turrell’s Skyspaces.

Midway up the garden, an old apple tree was heavily pruned and saved, and plantings such as palms, leafy tropical philodendrons, Colocasia “elephant ears” and creeping leucadendron ground cover were added. At the very top, a green wall with Soleirolia soleirolii, or baby’s tears, combined with dwarf geraniums came from Flora Grubb nursery.

“The owner loves bright colors and pop art and we wanted something cartoony, young and fun outside as well,” Danielle Steuernagel, who used to be an event planner, says.

Inside the house, “My client was still trying to define his style,” Reed adds. However, as a MIT dropout who came to the Bay Area to start a tech company, he is partial to modernism and rejected the house’s decorative hardware and other flourishes.

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OUTSIDE THE BOX EXTERIOR Entry door, custom-made pivot door, painted red glass, Fenestration Concepts, fenestrationconcepts.com. Siding, Delta’s Burn & Brush, Shou-Sugi Ban, Delta Millworks, deltamillworks.com. Windows, Fleetwood, fleetwoodusa.net. LANDSCAPING Outdoor seating, bench in grotto, Galanter & Jones, Helios Lounge, galanterandjones.com.

Hot Tub, Diamond Spas, diamondspas.com.

Fire pit, HPC, hpcfire.com. Lawn swings, Paola Lenti, paolalenti.it. ENTRY Lighting, pendant, Bocci, bocci.ca. SECOND FLOOR Untitled

Lamperti Contracting & Design | San Rafael | lampertikitchens.com

sculpture, 2016, under stair, Kirk Stoller, kirkstoller.com. MEDIA ROOM Mah Jong lounge seating, Roche Bobois, roche-bobois. com. Black Marquina marble countertop, New Marble Co., newmarbleco.com. Charcoal gray silk rug, ABC Carpet, abchome.com. MUSIC ROOM Green USM modular shelving, Haller, usm.com. Green Taurus alcove fabric, Maharam, maharam.com. Walls/paint, Snow Fall White #OC118, Benjamin Moore, benjamin moore.com. Flooring, fir, First Last Always, first-last-always.com. MASTER BEDROOM Reclaimed bleached plain sliced Douglas fir wood wall, First Last Always. Bed, Ruche,

custom cabinetry

Ligne Roset, ligne-roset.com. MASTER BATHROOM Plumbing fixtures, Sen Series, finish black, Agape, agapedesign.it. Tub, Sabbi Freestanding, Boffi, boffi.com. Rain shower, Balance Modules, Dornbracht, dornbracht. com. Sink, Evo-E2 Series, Agape. Countertop/ flooring, Calcatta Oro classic marble, New Marble Co. LIVING ROOM Couch, Tuffy Time, B&B Italia, bebitalia.com. Fireplace, 150 Series, Ortal, ortalheat.com. Fireplace surround, blackened steel, custom, standard sheet metal.

Lighting, tape in downlighting, Lucifer, luciferlighting.com. Sliding door, Norwood series, Fleetwood. KITCHEN/Dining Island

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Cabinetry, Spiral III Design. Countertops, Honed Calacatta Oro Franchi Marble, New Marble Co. Lighting, Mobile Chandelier 8, Michael Anastassiades, michaelanastassiades. com. Dining ceiling, polished stainless steel, standard sheet metal, standardsheetmetal

We finance homes like these.

sf.com. Appliances (dishwasher, refrigerator, cooktop) Gaggenau, gaggenau.com. Artwork, paintings, Joey Piziali, joeypiziali.com. FRONT DECK Sliding door, Norwood EX 3070-Series, Fleetwood. Outdoor furniture, Orlando Sofa System, Strap side table and Frame outdoor low table, Paola Lenti. Office, Muuto 70/70 Desk, Muuto, muuto.com. Oslo Sofa, Muuto & Anderssen & Voll. Executive chair, Herman Miller, hermanmiller.com. Artwork, “Night Ride,” 2015, Matthew Palladino, matthewpalladino.com.

Opposite from top: A horizontal motif extends the sense of motion and expanse on this deck overlooking the water; a massive door swings into the entry courtyard, nestled between two panes of glass; this combination of transparency, openness and material heaviness is repeated throughout the house. This image: The clients wanted an open and structurally-transparent feel, visible here in a view of the living room, kitchen, and second-floor catwalk. Warm wooden beams interact with crisp steel structural elements to create a spare yet cozy look.

POINT OF

VIEW

A CREATIVE COUPLE’S SAUSALITO HOUSE HAS ONE OVERRIDING DESIGN FEATURE: THE NATURAL CANVAS OF THE MARIN LANDSCAPE.

BY E VA HAG B E RG FI S H E R P H OTOG R AP H S BY B R U CE DAM O NTE

“RIGHT NOW I’M LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW; THE FOG

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PHOTO CREDIT

is blowing by, the trees are moving, I have the water with boats going around,” Molly West says. “This is our live canvas.”

The bookbinder is talking about her Sausalito house, which she and her husband, Chuck Slaughter, commissioned architect Peter Pfau to build on a lot right next door to their old house seven years ago. Because of the liveliness outside, the owners wanted to “keep everything else a little serene and quiet,” Molly says, describing how in this house, so much of the art — the creative direction, if you will — comes from nature.

The house is perched on the edge of a hillside — from the road, its facade is virtually imperceptible, striations of wood fading into foliage, a setback from the street giving it a sense of privacy. The house faces the waterfront and from that vantage point, levels of wood and glass trip down the hillside, offering a way of reading the house in levels — main floor for everyone; upstairs for the parents; downstairs for the kids. Inside, a family of five — Molly, Chuck and their three sons — make do with a minimalist yet luxuriously detailed space outfitted, as Molly points out, with the detritus of real life: the occasional lacrosse stick, Magic the Gathering card, or hand-bound sketchbook produced by Molly in her in-home studio.

“We wanted the space to be able to evolve and grow over time with the changing needs of all of us in the house,” Molly says. The home has seen change since its construction — three small children have grown into three larger children; Molly’s focus has shifted from bookbinding into a combination of creativity and parenting; and Chuck, who received a bachelor’s degree in architecture, is always adapting as an entrepreneur.

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POINT OF VIEW

Getting some big ideas?

DECK Deck lounge chairs, Crate and Barrel, crateandbarrel.com. FOYER Artwork, Tom Slaughter, tomslaughter.com. LIVING ROOM Asian armchairs, The Gardener, Berkeley, thegardener.com. Bar stools, West Elm, westelm.com. Coffee table, custom. DINING ROOM Dining table, The Gardener. Chairs, midcentury, flea market, reupholstered.

FAMILY ROOM Sofa, custom. Surfer painting,

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David Venezky. OFFICE Desk chair with perforations, IKEA, ikea.com. MASTER BATH

Contact HomeStreet Bank today to learn more about our home loan options. www.homestreet.com

Tub, Wetstyle, wetstyle.ca. MASTER BEDROOM Lamp, Tolomeo Lamps, Artemide Lighting.

A PAINTER’S PLACE OFFICE Artwork, “Me and Marie,” oil on linen,

San Francisco 415-489-7703

The skyrocketing cost of rent

has created an exodus — or expulsion — of artists from San Francisco to the East Bay that hasn’t been stemmed for nearly two decades now.

However, painter Christopher Brown, whose reputation as an artist blossomed in the Bay Area during the mid-1980s, was one of the lucky ones who years ago chose Oakland (when he was a graduate student at UC Davis) and later Berkeley, where he has lived and worked for three decades.

Brown presciently seized the opportunity to partner with fellow artist Catherine Alden, a sculptor, to build his home and studio in an industrial section of Berkeley called Ocean View.

Ceramicist Peter Voulkos worked on his sculptures in a loft close by, but the area was otherwise desolate; today’s vibrant shops, galleries and restaurants on nearby Fourth Street would have been inconceivable.

“Catherine had purchased an empty lot and we designed a pair of condominiums together,” Brown says. “It was easy. I gave my drawings to an architect who made it buildable.”

Brown had been teaching at UC Berkeley and had saved enough not only to pay for his half of the 6,000-square-foot property but also the construction costs, which all came to an affordable $350,000.

Sonoma 707-931-5500

PHOTO CREDIT

A Painter’s Place

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The two-story 5,500-square-foot live/work wood-frame building they created suited them perfectly. Their asymmetrical units were conjoined and had two floors each, “but I had more of the top floor because I needed light and she needed most of the stable ground floor for her sculptures,” Brown says.

The industrial zoning allowed leeway in choice of materials, and low-maintenance corrugated galvanized-steel cladding for the exterior was a top pick — well ahead of the current vogue — because “steel was cheap then, and it was beautiful,” Brown says. To complement it, the front door was painted a cheerful red.

They also kept interior details basic until they could afford improvements. Plywood floors were eventually covered with spruce planks and, to save money, Brown built himself much-needed kitchen cabinets and shelving for books.

His roughly square-shaped main floor upstairs was divided equally for living and working.

“Both sections were about 20-by-40-feet on each side of the stairs coming up from my street-level 500-square-foot storage space,” Brown says. A kitchen and small living space with a loft bedroom took up one side, and,

FIGURATIVE ARTIST CHRISTOPHER BROWN SKETCHED HIMSELF A DREAM HOME AND THEN BUILT IT.

BY Z AH I D SAR DAR P H OTOG R AP H S BY CE SAR R U B IO

In what was originally designed as his painting studio with high clerestory windows and ribbon skylights, Bay Area artist Christopher Brown now has a home office that sometimes doubles as a party space. A corner slit window was created to allow the artist to slip stretched canvases on their way to galleries, exhibitions or clients, directly onto a waiting truck.

Two self-revelatory oil canvases he has kept are “Me and Marie,” 2005, a pastoral self-portrait with a former girlfriend, and “Cat Listening to the Radio,” 1996, derived from a USA Today advertisement, of a cartoonish cat that he painted during an extended stay in New York. The carpet in the painting resembles the Turkish carpet from Woven Legends on the birch wood floor.

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RESOURCES

ROBERTA ENGLISH

2005, 80 by 80 inches, Christopher Brown,

CONTEMPORARY ASIAN ARTS

christopherbrownpainting.com. “Cat Listening to the Radio,” oil on linen, 1996, 80 by 80 inches, Christopher Brown. Contemporary Turkish carpet, Woven Legends, woven

The gallery exhibits museum quality works by notable artists including:

legends.com. Armchair, Wassily, Knoll, knoll. com. Slumped ceramic piece, Clayton Bailey, 1991, claytonbailey.com. Mesh octagonal

Satish GUPTA Shoichi IDA JU Ming LI Huayi Mayumi ODA Toko SHINODA Kazuaki TANAHASHI CHEUNG Yee and other artists in the Collection

sculpture by Peter Rosenfeld, 1986. Honeycomb ceramic sculpture by Philip Krohn, 2011, philipkrohn.com. LIVING ROOM Blue artwork, Untitled, gouache on paper, 44 by 30 inches, Christopher Brown. Framed print of feet, multicolored etching by Alex Katz, alexkatz. com. Red leather sofa, DWR, dwr.com.

Sculptural supporting post, John Abduljaami, Oakland. Blond wood table, artist Allan Adams, 1982. Artwork, “Espaliering the Pear Tree,” 2003, gouache on paper on panel, 44 by 30 inches, Christopher Brown, 2002.

Arrow-back chairs, Ohio, 1920s. KITCHEN AND STAIRS Sculpture, Robert Brady, Berkeley.

Gallery hours by appointment

1615 Bridgeway, Sausalito, CA 415.331.2975 www.robertaenglish.com

Baseball mitts and gloves, owner’s personal collection.

LUI Shou-kwan, Hong Kong, 1919 -1975

ARCHITECTURAL ALCHEMY

WITH SMOKED MIRRORS, ARCHITECT WILLIAM DUFF TRANSFORMED A MODEST BARN IN NAPA INTO A LUMINOUS SCULPTURE.

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PHOTO CREDIT

PHOTO CREDIT

BY R E E D WR I G HT P H OTOG R AP H S BY MAT TH E W M I LLMAN

A barn that stood on art collectors Cindy and Howard Rachofsky’s Napa Valley vineyard for a century, was moved recently, after they acquired the 7-acre property to spend summers away from Dallas where they live. In its new location, it serves as an airy entertainment pavilion. Although the original barn, intended for drying hay, was left intact with light and air passing through its slatted structure, architect William Duff of San Francisco provided it with a new concrete plinth that allows outdoor dining terraces around it. Inside, a dining area for smaller parties is centered between two new, mirrored cabins that reflect the bronze trestle and wood-top table by BDDW infinitely; one cabin contains a service kitchen and the other a gym.

Views ricocheting in the interior include the surrounding vineyards, an organic garden and other farmhouse buildings on the property.

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ARCHITECTURAL ALCHEMY Builder, Centric General Contractors, centricgc.com. Fiberglass pendant lamps, Allan Knight, allan-knight.com. Bronze trestle table, oxidized maple/blackened bronze, BDDW, bddw.com. Flooring, custom, polished concrete. Mirrors, custom, cut to fit. Fan, MinkaAire, minkagroup.net. Wood walls, custom finished white oak.

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EPOCH COLLECTION FRONT HALL/STAIRCASE Papier-mâché kneeling figures, Italian, circa 1600. Stacked paintings, various, by owner/artist Linda Cosgrove, cosgrovefineart.com. MIRROR/ CANDLESTICK 18th-century Mexican cupola.

Gilt, wood and vellum centerpiece. Early Michoacan terra-cotta urn. 18th-century silverleaf Italian prickets. 17th-century Bolognese scepter. LIVING ROOM

Co-owners Rachel Blum and Jaclyn Blum-Guelfi

17th-century Italian framed mirror, Antiquario,

2100 Redwood Hwy, Larkspur I www.bayareawindowfactory.com

SF. 17th-century Spanish Churriguera portico,

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San Rafael Auction Gallery, sanrafaelauction. com. 18th-century needlework on silk fireplace screen. 18th-century Italian finials, Siena

Epoch Collection A PAINTER’S PRIZED COLLECTION OF BAROQUE RELICS OFFERS GRAND GESTURES AT EVERY TURN INSIDE THIS LIGHT-FILLED SAN RAFAEL HOME.

BY SAR AH LY N CH P H OTOG R AP H S BY DAVI D D U N C AN LIVI N G STO N

IN RENAISSANCE PAINTING , chiaroscuro is the dramatic contrast of dark and light. For those who know her, that word could also be used to describe the artist Linda Cosgrove.

A former model, the statuesque Cosgrove is a lighthearted character who paints dark scenes reminiscent of Caravaggio — think illuminated headless saints and unwinged angels set against a mysteriously deep black background. With a quick, honest laugh, she leads guests through her home pointing out 18th-century reliquaries (that may contain vestiges of saintly remains) and gilded Italian candle prickets, while sharing funny anecdotes about family trips to Italy and the trials of hauling home her finds.

Located on a tree-lined street in the Dominican neighborhood, Cosgrove’s Spanish Colonial home features a set of worn wooden front doors brought back from Mexico. Beyond these doors, the large foyer is marked by a series of tableaux designed from ornate architectural pieces and gilded mirrors along with doll-like saint figures and other religious relics. Looking down from the staircase landing are a life-size pair of kneeling figures in their original 17th-century dresses. In the adjacent living room and sunroom, every surface is arranged with a curated display of baroque treasures. And in the dining room, an array of Venetian glass and china is

PHOTO CREDIT

The entrance to the home of Linda Cosgrove and Perry Burr is packed with treasures, including a pair of 17th century papier-mâché kneeling figures displayed on the staircase landing. Opposite: Two main vignettes in the foyer feature an early Michoacan terra cotta urn and an 18th-century Mexican cupola made from gilt wood and vellum.

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Antiques, Petaluma, siennaantiques.com, on Italian rococo carved gilt wood chest. Polished Nambé bud vase by Eva Zeisel. Lava rock pear designed by Louise Mann. LIVING ROOM WITH CENTER CHEST 18th-century pair of painted and gilt Roman bust reliquaries, from Max Fleischer Estate (creator of Betty Boop).

DINING ROOM TABLE 18th-century Italian arm reliquaries on giltwood console. 18th-century Italian carved shell. Painted and gilt wood center piece. 19th-century French mirror.

TABLE SETTING Rock crystal pepper dish from the Roger Thomas Collection. Silver votive. 18th-century wooden candelabra.

DINING ROOM CHEST 18th-century Spanish Vargueno cabinet. Pair of 18th-century Italian mirrors. 16th-century Madonna. 18th-century Italian prickets. ART CLOSE-UP Goblet painting, oil on copper by Linda Cosgrove.

19th-century continental plaster cast medallions on 15th-century leather-bound breviary.

DESK Pre-Columbian figurative terra-cotta vessel. Owner’s personal collections of pieces from travels to Latin America (hand door knocker, 200 B.C. Roman bust).

PHOTO CREDIT

PLAYING TO

An art piece, in the form of a stone and gravel entry path designed by Topher Delaney, is a love poem in Braille. Surface Design extended the path with staggered concrete pavers coursing through a river rock swale (intended to manage storm water) 102 WbyI Nbamboo T E R / S Pthickets.

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THE GALLERY

FUN INFUSES THIS GARDEN OF PATHWAYS, RAMPS AND MOUNDS THAT DOUBLES AS LAND ART AND EXHIBITION SPACE FOR SCULPTURE.

BY R E E D WR I G HT P H OTOG R AP H S BY MAR IO N B R E N N E R

PLAYING TO THE GALLERY SCULPTURE “Roundout,” 2005, an aluminum sculpture by artist Travis Constance.

Items pictured but not listed are from private collections, or no additional details are available.

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R E A R W I N D OW

BY K A S I A PAW LOW S K A

FROM ARTILLERY TO ARTS How decommissioned Bay Area military bases became the first to garrison creativity.

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reveal themselves in many forms — including shipyards, bunkers, hangars and myriad decommissioned Nike missile sites — and the Bay Area has led the way in finding creative new uses for multiple former war houses that have received an art-house spin as unexpected adaptive reuse projects. Perhaps the best example of this kind of conversion is the evolution of Fort Barry in Sausalito into the Headlands Center for the Arts. Opened in 1908, Fort Barry operated through much of the 20th century before its closure in 1974 and eventual transfer to the National Park Service in 1982.

The transformation of the space into the creativity breeding ground it is today began in 1986 when artist David Ireland and sculptor Mark Thompson put out a classified ad for artists to take part in a work trade program and rehabilitate Building 944’s Eastwing and Rodeo Room.

“Artists really steer the process; all of the earliest decisions about how the building would be treated were decided by the artists,” says HCA’s Vanessa Kauffman Zimmerly. The aesthetic idea of peeling back the layers is visible throughout the building. Upstairs, where 120 soldiers slept, the marks of their bunks scarred the walls. The initial 24-artist crew sandblasted paint off the VESTIGES OF WAR

ornate stamped-tin ceilings and dropped the lighting, harkening back to how the chamber would have looked when soldiers lived there.

Ireland and architect Mark Mack created lightweight, modular, movable furniture for meeting rooms. Evoking a Shaker sensibility, tables and other pieces “were designed so that there is no head of the table, to diminish hierarchy,” says Kauffman Zimmerly. The mottled wall colors, such as rich, chartreuse tones that hint at military camouflage, and the colors of the landscape in the summer, allude to past and present.

The bones of Building 944 have been preserved, including the first-floor mess hall that artist Ann Hamilton renovated in 1989. She covered the mess hall walls with Xerox prints of images she found in botanical books and then coated with beeswax. The Latrine, a unisex restroom by architects Bruce Tomb and John Randolph of the erstwhile firm IOOA, also whimsically nods to the building’s history, with use of quarter-inch-thick Japanese steel, which the artists thought would be ironic to include in a former U.S. military fort.

The creativity born here has yielded impressive results. To date, Headlands Center for the Arts has hosted 12 MacArthur “Genius” recipients and 22 Guggenheim fellows. headlands.org n

JACK WOLFORD (CURRENT); COURTESY HEADL ANDS CENTER FOR THE ARTS (HISTORICAL)

Clockwise from left: Studio building 945; the Rodeo Room formerly housed 120 soldiers and now the stamped-tin ceiling is accented by the walls featuring chartreuse tones that hint at summer landscapes and military camouflage; a historical shot of Fort Barry, where to the left buildings 945 and 944 can be seen.

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