Architect Neal Schwartz and his partner, lawyer Ron Flynn, didn’t want to move from their loft home on Potrero Hill in San Francisco until they had the urge to adopt a dog. And that led to their purchase and remodel of a rundown 800-square-foot house into an unusual three-story home designed around a courtyard, a tour-de-force for Schwartz. It was his first big project.

In the city, the time or space never seemed to be right, but nevertheless, Schwartz, who grew up with five dogs in Worcester, Mass., and Flynn decided to get Bruno, “our big Swiss mountain dog. We thought Bruno would want a yard.”

They found the house just blocks away with a deep lot and plenty of potential to expand because the neighboring buildings were much larger. The 1950s structure had a small interior courtyard vestibule and an ugly security gate. It wasn’t a dream house, but it was within walking distance of the California College of Art, where Schwartz, 44, teaches.

When an architect designs his own home, the task of making choices becomes limitless and can bog him down, Schwartz said.

It took them two years to decide what they would do with the space, some of it dictated by budget. While renters lived in their new home, Bruno was getting ever larger. Nevertheless, the long wait had its rewards. “We were able to finesse so many details,” said Schwartz. “We made many models. It became an obsession,” he admitted.

In effect Schwartz and Flynn’s house is a case study, similar to those done in the 1950s in Southern California. Details — custom metal railings fashioned from standard off-the-shelf parts, steel risers with wooden treads and anodized aluminum sills for tiled bathrooms — that Schwartz perfected in this house also appear in new projects by his firm.

“I always loved the central courtyards in the Case Study houses, especially one by Pierre Koenig where there is a void in the middle,” said Schwartz. With long-considered moves, the dumpy two-story house was transformed into a 2,700-square-foot, three-story custom home arranged around a small off-center courtyard, which contains a double flight of switchback stairs from the street entrance to the top. Another door off the vestibule leads to Schwartx and Architecture’s office in the basement which opens to the backyard.

The courtyard floor is covered in cool slate, perfect for Bruno, who likes to rest in that protected outdoor space, which used to be a bedroom.

The original vestibule led to a covered stair and landing that turned into the hall.

Rather than tacking on a mundane fire escape, Schwartz made the exterior stairway, which connects the open courtyard to the third-floor deck, intrinsic to the design. Another internal staircase also comfortably connects the top two floors, where they live. Deck stairs in back connect to the yard.

“I wouldn’t have had so many stairs if the code didn’t demand them,” said Schwartz. “But, thinking back, without this requirement the courtyard would have been much too closed off. It is now the formal entry to our home.”

Their house, although quite modern, has the air of a Roman villa. Outside, its flat Italianate stucco-clad facade fits perfectly into a neighborhood of Victorians and midcentury structures, small shops and restaurants.

“I spent a lot of time in Europe looking at architecture,” said Schwartz. “I tried to keep all those influences abstract.”

His design incorporates big expanses of stucco walls and spare, high-ceilinged rooms. Schwartz likes perforating spaces so you can look from one end of the house to the other.

“I like cross views. I scooped the space out, and we just cut a big hole in the roof and made the courtyard into outdoor space,” he said. Similarly, he scooped out interior walls to extend sightlines. “I remember spending hundreds of hours working on the proportion of the space to not have it too closed off or too dark.

“When we were designing the courtyard, we would call it the light well even when it was more than that but, at 8 by 10 feet, it was too small to call a courtyard, so we penciled in ‘magnificent light well’ on the drawings,” Schwartz said. It is just wide enough for those two flights of stairs side by side, but seems more spacious. “I am getting good at making small spaces feel really big.

“The new courtyard is where the master bedroom was. We rebuilt the stairs as they were, but you pop up outside.” The surprise open-to-the-sky landing in the middle of the house is exhilarating.

“It seems counterintuitive when you take away a third of a house in order to get more space. I am not sure a client would have reacted well to that,” said Schwartz.

Now Schwartz has proof to convince them all that it can all work.

source : www.sfgate.com

Resource

Neal Schwartz, Schwartz & Architecture, 860 Rhode Island St., Studio A, San Francisco, CA 94107

(415) 550-0430

www.schwartzandarchitecture.com

If you have a good new design story that hasn’t been told, E-mail Zahid Sardar at zsardar@sfchronicle.com.

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