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AIA East Bay held its inaugural Homes Tour, Saturday, August 13, 2011. The self-guided tour celebrated design excellence, inspiring and educating the public about the impact of architecture on East Bay living. Click here for the Call for Entries for the 2012 Home Tours.

Saturday, August 13, 2011

10am-4:30pm

8 houses: Oakland, Berkeley, Orinda & Lafayette

Architects:

At-Six Architecture, de Laveaga Stoops Architecture, Geoffrey Holton and Associates, Glass Associates, Inc. Architecture & Planning, John Ware Architecture (Endres Ware), Leger Wanaselja Architecture, Studio Bergtraun, AIA, Architects, and Swatt I Miers Architects.

Sponsors

Premier Sponsor

The Grubb Company

Media Sponsor

Diablo Magazine

Industry Sponsors

American Soil & Stone

Arclinea San Francisco

Associated Building Supply / Jeld-Wen

Bodyguard Wood Products

Lutron

Toto USA

Special thanks to our Orinda Ticket Headquarters: Table 24.

About the Houses:

DIY House
A small second house on an urban lot, designed to be built by the owner who had no prior construction experience. The architects, who are also engineers, meticulously planned the building and its assembly methods to meet a restrictive program and a very tight budget, while celebrating the beauty of simple, durable materials. The house is a clever box, designed for energy efficiency and future expandability.

Berkeley Cube
A modern cube addition, 20 feet in each dimension, sits in a backyard peering over a plain worker’s bungalow from the 1940’s. The herringbone grid of the exterior siding emphasizes the attention paid to modularity and efficiency on this project. Energy consumption, sustainability and a modest budget drove the design process. Though smartly modern in style, the cube continues in the vein of practicality established by the stucco Bungalow.

McGee House
This two bedroom infill house in Berkeley is resolutely ‘green’ and devoted to salvage and reuse of materials. The upper walls are clad with metal from over 100 car roofs. The awnings are made from old Dodge Caravan windows. The lower story is clad with poplar bark, a furniture manufacturing waste product. The building brings these materials back to life in a form that looks like it is still alive.

Queens Road House

Inspired by the Roman impluvium, an ancient courtyard design that collected rainwater into an underground cistern, this house harvests and recycles rainwater from its roof into a storage tank array in its base. The project received the first permit for residential rainwater catchment in the City of Berkeley. This new impluvium house combines modern and bay area regional styles in a broad winged structure that opens to San Francisco Bay views.

Kapoor Residence

A boldly modern house perched atop the Berkeley Hills stacks and folds three layers of living space that slide outward to commanding views of the San Francisco Bay, via dramatic cantilevered terraces and disappearing walls of glass. Visitors to this secluded paradise feel as if they have entered a private palace. Sculpture from the owners’ native India and paintings by their daughter complement the carefully chosen and detailed materials of the house.

Strathmoor Drive

A rear yard addition doubles the size of this house without obscuring views or squeezing the already tight lot. The architects inserted a master suite into the rear hillside below the yard and popped a glass gallery, writer’s office and lap pool above the lawn. Though the addition is below grade, the spaces are filled with light and show an accomplished designer’s understanding of space, circulation and vistas. The owner took a year off from work to act as his own general contractor.

Historic Orinda Estate

This estate property has been in the same family since the 1870’s and was once 1,100 acres, including the land now occupied by the Orinda Country Club. An architect in the family has remodeled the kitchen area of the main residence, converted the horse barn to a guest house with an office in the hay loft and transformed the old caretaker’s cottage into a lovely, bright residence.

Mid-Century Modern

A mid-century California modern house was completely remodeled by a team of architects as a hands-on

spec venture. The resulting house shows sensitivity to the original design and landscape, careful attention to new and existing materials, ingenuity, efficiency and craftsmanship. The best of the 1950’s was preserved while a new sense of space, colors and textures were woven together for casual, indoor/outdoor

living.

Questions? Please contact Sidney Sweeney, executive director at 510/464-3600 or sidney@aiaeb.org.