CORONA HEIGH TS PARK
FLINTSTREET
16 TH STREET
“It had been remodeled by weekend warriors
for a century,” the architect Craig Steely
says, explaining why the house had taken
on a life of its own. “It was just a mess.”
The penthouse is one
clear, column-free
span, supported solely
by the exoskeleton.
In the foreground
is the skylight that
brings sunlight into
the open kitchen.
in the center of San Francisco with a prospect that reached
over this terminally foggy city, the simple three-story duplex
had accrued layers of asymmetrical history and curious
materials, particularly wood. Many, many different sizes
of redwood. “It had been remodeled by weekend warriors
for a century,” Steely says, explaining why the house had
taken on a life of its own, a pastiche of a hundred years
of seemingly good ideas undercut by too-small budgets and
bad ideas executed by too-large budgets. “It had avoided
every historical survey that had gone through there,” Steely
says. “It was just a mess.” He looked at the dry rot and the
ahistorical aesthetic and the general disarray, and thought
they should just tear it down and build a new house. The
thing is, Martin is an artist and Wang’s a filmmaker, and they
had a different feeling about just tearing down an old house,
given that they can see the art and magic in everything
around them.
Steely liked the couple—“There was a tremendous amount
of awesome owner involvement,” he says—and so he decided
