Brookside House, Oakland California
In 1989, a huge fire swept through the entire neighborhood, including the house that stood on this narrow site of which only one large redwood survived. The client, a landscape architect, wanted a home that provided an open plan with sunny decks and allowed the redwood to co-exist with the new home. The house’s final form took on that of a slender multi-storied structure with a small footprint well away from the redwood’s shallow roof system. The large trellis overhead suggests a forest by how the exposed roof structure, supported by tall steel columns acting as steel tree trunks, creates a forest-like canopy over the cantilevered deck below. Inside, the stair rises inside the home with two bridges that span across the stair volume with views to the forest and redwood that surround the home. The design is influenced by San Francisco Bay Area Modern or Critical Regionalism.