Translucence Home / Fougeron Structure

Translucence Home / Fougeron Structure

Textual content description supplied by the architects. This renovation and addition unravels a chapter of ill-considered renovations to create an city retreat for a younger household on a exceptional website. By re-using greater than half of the unique construction and enhancing the house’s environmental efficiency, the undertaking additionally minimizes the 4000 SF residence’s embodied carbon and ongoing carbon footprint.

The double-wide lot sits atop a bluff and subsequent to a group backyard, making for a uncommon situation within the coronary heart of town: a big, secluded website, overlooking town and the bay. The location was crammed and leveled within the early 1960’s to accommodate the unique home and pool, the scene of legendary events. Renovations by a subsequent proprietor led to a messy assortment of rooms out of sync with the circulate of day by day life

The design brings readability and openness to the house by taking an virtually surgical strategy, retaining important structural components whereas introducing new options. A sequence of interventions break aside the prevailing field, rewriting the relationships and connections between rooms. Glass and pure gentle each diffuse and maintain collectively the composition, defining scenes all through the home that discover perceptions of inside/exterior, non-public/public, and light-weight/darkish in addition to materiality.

Probably the most seen intervention is the insertion of an all-glass pavilion enclosing a eating and household room. Neither utterly indoors nor outside, this quantity reaches into the rear yard to have interaction sweeping views of the bay and East Bay hills past. Trellis of aluminum and wooden shade the area with out encumbering the sense of expansiveness.

An current two-story quantity–as soon as dominated by a cumbersome staircase–is opened as much as create a extra befitting entry method and a versatile lounge for the house. A brown-glass stair and bridge float inside this area connecting ranges and rooms, and including a dimension of sunshine and shade. The brown glass, which evokes the modern-era origins of the house, shifts from strong to clear with the altering gentle every day. Round this lounge lengthen two wings of residing area: an open kitchen anchors the eating/residing pavilion on one aspect whereas a visitor room and little one’s play room sit reverse.

The higher ground is expanded and refined. The main bedroom is reimagined as a singular, light-filled quantity extending the total depth of the ground to the outside. A curved glass bathe pushes past the envelope of the home and into the screened entrance balcony—a secretly provocative gesture to the road under. On this area particularly the play of privateness and views, gentle and shadow, recall California’s Mild and House artwork motion to which the design pays homage.

All through the home curved kinds and playful components—together with a toddler’s fireplace pole connecting the 2 flooring—counter the house’s rectilinear type. Lastly, a entrance facade composed vertical and horizontal wooden boards and slats, echoes the trellises and partitions, tying collectively the house’s private and non-private expressions and changing an opaque avenue presence with a wooden display activated by shifting gentle from day to nighttime.