Some outtakes from a trip to Paris a couple of weeks ago… inspo everywhere!
1) Jardin des Tuileries
2&3) Art Nouveau chair and Van Gogh at Musée d’Orsay
4) Notre Dame
5) Lots of window shopping (and let’s face it, real shopping too) all over… particularly fell for @beatrizgarrigo ’s ceramics at @lamaisondecommerce …! Already scheming to get these into a project!
Over on the east side of the Family Room, a simple, quiet space with minimal ornamentation in the project area promotes creative thinking. A custom-designed white oak table was added, wide enough for art projects, puzzles, or sewing. We also installed an additional built-in, which now provides plenty of storage space for a plethora of art and craft materials.
Photography by @lesliewilliamson
For our Berkeley Family Room project, we transformed an unfurnished, disorganized play and craft space into a cozy, contemporary rec room for a creative Waldorf family.
The spacious front room of the home was previously a large, unfurnished play room. With the children growing out of some of this younger type of creative play, the homeowners decided it was time to reimagine the room to create a space of cozy family gathering that could accommodate some shared screen-viewing activities while still prioritizing conversation, craft and art projects, and other creative pursuits.
We removed an abandoned and defunct masonry fireplace to capture a bit more floor area, allowing us to create a floor-to-ceiling built-in. The built-in now houses ample shelves for books, games, baskets of toys, and the newly introduced TV. Perhaps the built-in’s most precious feature is the cozy reading nook, which provides a quiet, separate space in the room, perfect for times when the family desires to be together but also wishes to ‘do their own thing’.
Photography by @lesliewilliamson
At our Ross Hunting Cabin, new gardens surrounding the home are next on our clients “to do list”, and we are putting finishing touches on our design work for new hardscaping and plantings that celebrate the gorgeous oak woodland forest and historic architecture for kick off later this summer! Drawing inspiration from the existing vernacular of local, stone rubble walls, this sweet, old long-defunct fountain is nestled into the front garden and will be restored as part of our work.
We designed a circular meditation terrace under a 100-year-old Deodar Cedar tree for a Berkeley garden using end grain locust wood, which has a gorgeous color, grain, and is water resistant, so it can be used as paving without concern of rot. The locust wood also complies with the Wildland-Urban Interface ignition-resistant requirements, ensuring that the wood doesn’t spread flames in case of fire.
One of the first orders of business as we began our project at the San Rafael Hacienda was to give the giant Sequoia tree at the back of the site some much needed love and attention; years of deferred maintenance in this urban environment had rendered it rathered haggard. With some TLC by our favorite arborist, it’s nice and healthy now and it will preside over our upcoming garden design for this beautiful home!
Our Lafayette Minimalist project is true to its name; it’s a minimal house with very little furniture. The project relied mostly on built-ins for storage and for function. In the primary bedroom, the homeowner wanted a “glam-station” for getting ready for nights out. The slim and hidden built-in drawers are perfect for make-up and an edge to edge mirror with one-inch-wide, warm LED strip lighting creates balanced light control. The dressing room is similar: another edge-to-edge mirror with the same lighting strategy, augmented with a ventilating skylight above for washing natural light down across the mirror. Clothes are stored behind the sliding doors with coplanar hardware that lets the doors sit flush to each other when closed, which eliminates the offset you see in standard sliding doors and complements the minimalist approach to our design.
Photography by @lesliewilliamson
Exciting days at our Buena Vista Victorian House with the installation of the new stair! In order to keep this formal stair as thin and light as possible, we looked towards the details of traditional 18th century Georgian stairs common in London. For our stair, that meant a site-built steel substructure that will be clad in painted wood and stained oak, with a thin steel picket railing. The stairs connect the main living level with the newly reimagined attic level space that brings a modern touch to the Victorian home.
@brady_construction
The kitchen of the Lafayette Minimalist House features a custom, white oak island table, creating a central workspace as well as a place to gather. We employed whitewashed oak flooring and cabinets, Carrara marble counters, and matte-finish tiles in a slightly shifting range of whites paired with a custom-formulated white paint color in order to achieve a minimal and warm aesthetic. This soft palette was an essential design element for the homeowner, artist Marcia Barrow Taylor @projectmbt so that her home could double as a gallery to display her own work, as well as the work in her and her husband’s impressive collection of other artists’ work.
Photos by @lesliewilliamson
General Contractor @altmannassociates
The primary bedroom suite of our Lafayette Minimalist House continues the quiet material palette and crisp detailing of the rest of the house, which set off the homeowners’ beloved artifacts and textural furnishings. The suite enjoys a private sunken terrace for sunbathing among a grove of newly planted Japanese maple trees whose leaves change across the seasons.
Photos by @lesliewilliamson
General Contractor @altmannassociates
Completed in 2020, our Lafayette Minimalist House is the transformation of a 1940s California ranch house into the modern, dream home our clients had spent nearly 20 years planning for. We kept the footprint intact, but raised the roof above the main living space to create an airy uplift, punctured with floor-to-ceiling folding doors and windows that open up to the newly landscaped hillside. White oak floors and built-ins lend a subtle mid-tone between the black and white color scheme.
Photos by Leslie Williamson @lesliewilliamson
General Contractor @altmannassociates
At our Bayview Pool House project, the zig zag boardformed concrete site walls create a beautiful descent to the pool from the main house above, switchbacking through drought-tolerant, low maintenance flowering plants, citrus trees, and herbs, making it easy for the homeowners to grab a fresh cocktail garnish on their way down the hill.
These before and after photos are around a year and a half apart!
Contractor @brady_construction
After photography by @joefletcherphoto
Garden by @boxleafdesign
