Home Office | San Anselmo, CA
After years of daily commutes and workdays in impersonal office spaces, the clients longed for the chance to finally be able to work from home. With two teenage children, they wanted to be able to spend more time at home and stay more involved with their children’s lives. They were lucky enough that both of their jobs allow them to work from home. While their house in the hills above the town of San Anselmo in Marin County, CA offered an ideal setting for family life, it did not accommodate the requirements of work life, and lacking a dedicated office space, they found themselves forced to work from the living and dining rooms.
The couple originally approached San Anselmo based architect Jennifer Asselstine in October ’08 to see if they could make the house more suitable to their needs. When they first met, they talked about remodeling the kitchen to include a work-space for Wendy, and to create a private workspace within their budget, they had the idea of installing a Tuff-Shed in the rear yard to serve as Mike’s office. Jennifer drew up a preliminary scheme for the kitchen expansion, but was not a fan of the Tuff-Shed idea. Recognizing that the small scale and budget made it a perfect candidate for a student project, she suggested giving the job to a group of students at the Academy of Art University’s Architecture Department where she teaches in addition to her private practice. In June ’09 five students enrolled in a summer class led by Professor Greg Upwall in the University’s first Design-Build project.
Their assignment was to design a 120 sq. ft. office/studio that could be complete and installed on the steep hillside behind the house before the kitchen remodel began. The budget and timeframe were both tight. They had the summer semester, just three months, to both design and build the project and a material budget of roughly twice what the cost of a Tuff-Shed would have been. In addition to these practical challenges, they were given a list of requirements that their design must address. The class requirements called for a system that could be pre-fabricated in components, delivered to the site, and assembled without the need for large equipment, and with minimal disturbance to the site.
The modular system would enable the building to be built in the precision environment of the University’s workshop, and limit the assembly on the site to a more concise time period. But most importantly, Greg Upwall wanted them to think of this project as a proto-type, and develop ideas for how their design could be reproduced in a number of different configurations to accommodate different sites or users, from people in need of a home addition, to emergency shelters.
In the end they were able to create a design that was built from simple materials and techniques. Concrete foundations were poured on the site to match the dimensions of the structure that they were building simultaneously in the school shop. The shop fabricated modules were designed as interchangeable pieces of the roof, wall, and floor assembly that could be adapted into a variety of different configurations. The modules were bolted to each other and connected to six thin, internal steel moment frames that add structural rigidity. Materials were chosen to maximize efficiency and durability, and with an emphasis on environmentally sustainable materials. These criteria resulted in the use of salvaged redwood siding on the exterior, reclaimed mahogany used to build the custom doors, recycled denim insulation, LED lighting systems, and Low-E insulated glazing.