Bush Street House
San Francisco, California

Completed 2012

Design Team
Brian Messana, Toby O’Rorke, Aude Battesti, Emily Lowry, Natalie Reimann

Collaborators
Lighting Designer: Zerolux

This house walks a fine line between historic preservation and contemporary innovation, balancing  contradictory demands without compromising the integrity of either imperative. The project involved the merger of two compact cottages in lower Pacific Heights built shortly after the great 1906 earthquake. The 700-square-foot structures occupy a curious secret garden, concealed behind street-fronting townhouses and accessed by a narrow passageway, seventy feet long by three feet wide, beneath one of the townhouses. Historic preservation guidelines protected the cottages’ existing facades and also required a design solution that maintained the appearance of two independent, freestanding dwellings.

We joined the two structures with a glass gasket comprised of a glazed ceiling/skylight and two glass walls bracketing a new galley kitchen. This discreet architectural intervention brings light into the center of the conjoined house while visually dissolving the point of contact. The entry cottage contains a gracious living room organized around a fireplace, as well as a wall of closets and new French doors that lead to the brick courtyard and garden via a set of broad ipe stairs. The second cottage accommodates the bedroom, bathrooms, and a small study.

From the outside, the two dwellings appear much as they always have, simply refreshed. The radically reimagined interiors, however, reflect our abiding interest in crafting distilled modernist volumes and containers, many with hidden storage, which are animated by the play of natural and artificial light across their serene, minimalist surfaces. The house represents a nuanced rapprochement between the past and the present, preserving a piece of San Francisco history while ensuring its relevance and efficiency for the twenty-first century.

Photographs by Eric Laignel

Press

2020

Sallick, Barbara. The Perfect Kitchen. New York: Rizzoli (March 2020).

2016

Bishop, Deborah. “The 2-for-1 Dream Home.” San Francisco Chronicle (September 11, 2016).

Jao, Carren. Hue Journal Volume 01 (April 2016).

2015

“Best of Year.” Interior Design (December 2015).

O’Keeffe, Linda. “Tour a Chic Pacific Heights Cottage Designed by Messana O’Rorke.” San Francisco Cottage & Garden (November/December 2015).

Cohen, Edie. “High Style in Pacific Heights.” Interior Design (July 2015).

Awards

2015

Finalist for Small Houses, Interior Design Magazine’s Best of Year