Center Half Home / SAW // Spiegel Aihara Workshop
Center Half Home / SAW // Spiegel Aihara Workshop
Textual content description offered by the architects. The challenge is the transformative architectural and panorama design of a 1962 residence in Mill Valley for a pair and their two younger youngsters. The challenge, often called The Center Half, dramatically reconfigures the house’s core to create an open, light-flooded inside and direct connection to the panorama. Uncooked, textured supplies like galvanized metal, rough-sawn cedar siding, and cast-in-place concrete outline the challenge and intensify its sudden, layered geometries.
extremely congested core. Whereas the owners have been keen on its modest horizontal facade and easy strategy to supplies, they acknowledged the consequences of getting old and organizational flaws, which bifurcated household dwelling patterns and severed the inside from the location’s views. SAW’s design enlarges the house to three,457-sf, unlocks its structure to create an open-plan central dwelling house, and enhances its connection to the dramatic vistas. All through the house’s inside, fixtures and finishes have been designed collaboratively by SAW and one of many owners, Kina Ingersoll, an inside designer. Ingersoll additionally chosen the entire furnishings.
The design is outlined by a way of enlargement as one strikes from the entrance of the home, which is one degree alongside the road, to the again of the home, which carves down to 2 ranges and faces a steep, lush valley.
Approaching from the road, the facade is low-slung and grounded within the panorama. Lateral rough-sawn Western Pink cedar cladding enhances its horizontality, whereas slatted trellises slip past the roof and body the entrance entrances in opposition to the guiding angled wall of the storage. A sense of suspension shortly takes over upon coming into the house, the place a brand new circulation path crosses via the diffuse core, drawing a transparent sightline from the entrance door to the suspended rear deck and views past.
This path connects the house’s communal areas (kitchen, eating space, lounge, household room, and out of doors deck) alongside a central axis, whereas extra personal areas (bedrooms, loos, workplace, and visitor suite) peel off to the left and proper. By the entrance door, a tall, slender entry hall opens shortly into a large, open-format kitchen and eating space beneath exposed-beam ceilings, that are perforated by skylights that punch up and appear to peel again parts of the roof. Crisp white gypsum partitions and floor-to-ceiling white millwork improve a way of buoyancy and lightness, as refined long-stemmed pendant lights droop over a minimal grey kitchen bar quantity and a live-edge eating room desk, designed by one of many owners.
Whereas your complete house is an train in blurring distinctions between inside and exterior, this reaches its fullest expression on the rear. The kitchen-dining zone spills with out interruption into dwelling and household rooms bordered by floor-to-ceiling home windows and glass doorways that open to the suspended higher deck, implying layered continuity. The feeling is enhanced by inside ceiling beams that stretch into out of doors house, forming a slatted trellis over the again deck.
SAW’s design ensures that even the house’s extra intimate rooms converge with the panorama. A brand new, expansive 16-foot-wide sliding door carves into the first bed room’s entrance wall. This opens onto the redesigned entrance backyard, planted with a lush array of azaleas, lilies, and grasses. The linked major rest room is likewise organized round a window that reveals the entrance yard’s camphor tree.
Extending from the proper of the kitchen-dining space, a brief hallway stitches the primary quantity of the house to the youngsters’ wing, which angles to the west. Home windows lining this threshold, create a visible connection via the volumes, revealing the house’s layered, slipping geometries. On the opposite aspect of the kitchen, a stairwell slides subtly behind the household room’s open bookshelf down right into a lower-level bar/lounge, visitor room, and workplace; beforehand, there had been no inside connection between the upstairs and downstairs. The lounge additionally options glass floor-to-ceiling sliding doorways that open onto the decrease deck.
SAW designed the rear panorama to be volumetric, outlined by geometries shared with the architectural design. The extensive higher deck connects to the stepped decrease decks with a sharply outlined, hefty cedar staircase and railing comprised of galvanized metal posts and stainless-steel cable. The pool, positioned on the bottom deck, is seamless at one aspect—a void within the panorama—and but a strong rectilinear block within the hillside from one other. Beneath, terraces stagger as “panorama rooms” throughout the slope.
