Marin Courtyard Home.

A house planned around the time of day.

The clients had spent fifteen years in a Mediterranean apartment in Genoa before they moved their family to California. The brief was a house that worked the way that apartment worked. A courtyard at the center, every room one door away from it, and breakfast outside whenever the weather allowed.

The architecture was already strong. We worked with the existing footprint and re-cut the openings between the kitchen, the living room, and the courtyard so that all three rooms read as one in summer and as three in winter. A single sliding glass wall now does the work that two walls used to.

The palette is plaster and travertine inside, lime-washed brick outside, with one painted ceiling in a soft ochre that catches the late afternoon sun. The kitchen is a single long stone block. The dining table is a piece of the same stone offcut.