Golden Gate Heights

This project includes strategic updates to the existing: a monochromatic kitchen, an immersive fog-like bathroom, and a forest-inspired gym—using honest materials and sensitivity to light and color to create a cohesive home for an active family.

Perched in the hills of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Heights neighborhood, this three-story home was ready for a thoughtful update. The clients, avid athletes with careers in conservation and design, and their two young children, were looking to bring artistry to key areas using a resource-efficient strategic approach that would avoid a complete redo. The focus: a more generous kitchen for everyday family life, a re-imagined main bathroom, and a den that could flex as both a gym and media room. Each space was conceived as a distinct atmosphere in which light, material, and color evoke the city’s varied environments.

Kitchen — Monolith
Maple plywood and brushed stainless steel create a timeless calm where materials are expressed as they are, without paint or embellishment. The clients are avid cooks, so high quality simplicity that foregrounds food preparation were priorities. From its central location the room frames layered views toward the Golden Gate, braiding intimate family moments with an expansive landscape.

Bathroom — Fog
An immersive and dreamy quality defines the bathroom, where a continuous field of matte tile wraps all surfaces, blurring boundaries into an enveloping volume for the objects within. The satin-etched glass shower enclosure becomes a sculptural presence in this foggy space. Like the kitchen, the absence of paint creates a depth of texture and color that is palpable.

Basement — Forest
In the basement, an existing split-level layout was enlarged for better dual use as a gym and a media platform. Neutral colors unify an informal palette, where a textural whitewashed ceiling adds brightness against a bold and playful structure. Expanded windows enhance daylight and connect this lower level to the Headlands and beyond, to which the clients have a deep connection.

The result is a home that has clarity and character. Through honest materials, thoughtful framing, and a sensitivity to light and color to create mood, the remodel transforms a once-fragmented house into a cohesive home that is rooted in its surroundings and tailored to the daily rhythms of a creative, active family.