Sunnyvale is a suburban neighbourhood about 45 minutes south of San Francisco and it's mainly
single family houses and families living here. This project was a renovation of an
Eichler building which was trying to give high design to the masses. A lot of Eichlers have a
flat ceiling but this model really benefited from having this twin gable shape that brings a lot of
height and openness. Matthaeus and Isabelle came to me with a lot of ideas and their main ask was
to make the house feel like a modern house while recognising what it is historically.
When you approach the house, you enter through a door into the central atrium space
there's a real element of surprise because one thinks they're walking into the house
but actually you're just in an interior garden.
When the doors are open there's really just something magical that happens,
you truly lose a sense of where the building stops and starts. The house just has this sense
of transparency, the physical walls feel like they dematerialize and they're not even there.
One of the things I love the most about the house is the play of light throughout the day, the house
always feels very dynamic, the way sun enters and shifts through the day, it's really like a movie.
One of the first things that Isabelle and Matthaeus asked for was the feeling
of really being enveloped in a very lush garden,
they wanted to feel like there was greenery surrounding them at every possible point.
One of our main goals was to have the house really feel like it was sitting
within a garden and feel somewhat detached from the sidewalk. In order to achieve that
we used sliding planes of concrete bands that have planting surrounding
them and they really feel a little bit disguised within the landscape.
Ryan really leaned into the idea of the indoor outdoor connection and really worked hard to
blur the lines between the landscape and the interiors which allowed the landscape
to be on full display from just about every angle and every single room in the house.
When we started the process of working with Stephanie on the landscape design,
Isabelle and Matthaeus came with reference images of hundred year old gardens, we quickly
realized that they wanted a lush space. This house is very much more of an interior looking house.
The green space at the atrium was just so key for making the house feel special.
I think the gardens are really one of the primary materials in this house.
The level of transparency that you get throughout the house really
incorporates that landscape into all the interior spaces.
We incorporated asparagus fern and phormium and some agave,
but we really kept the organization of the plantings very loose. We created a lot of
rhythm and repetition but there is a little bit of chaos in the way that the plants interact.
With these projects, seeing beautiful photographs after
the fact is always very rewarding, but seeing families grow with and actually
use the spaces in sometimes unexpected ways for me is really what fills me up.
It's been so rewarding to hear from Matthaeus and Isabelle how much they
love living in the space and the freedoms that it gives them and gives their kids.
Truly my favourite part of the house is just seeing how much they enjoy living here.
They've really made it their own and in time they've just settled more and
given it such a warm, nice feeling while still maintaining the modern aesthetic.