While out on the town with us for a high-class dinner at Joe's Cable Car on Saturday Night, Telstar Logistics Senior Design Consigleri Joshua Aidlin mentioned -- with humble reluctance, and only after some insistent prodding -- that one of his recent projects would be the subject of a major to-do in this weekend's Sunday New York Times Magazine.
Sure enough, when we opened our Sunday Times this morning, we immediately flipped to the article about the house that Josh calls the "Great Highway Residence." When he's not on assignment for Telstar Logistics, Josh is a partner at the architectural firm Aidlin Darling Design, and his work is drop-dead gorgeous -- warm, modern, sophisticated, thoughtful, and richly detailed. The Great Highway project entailed a renovation and addition to a beachfront house in San Francisco owned by a gent who is a hedge fund manager and surfer (not necessarily in that order). Pilar Viladas picks up the rest of the story in the Times:
The original house, which was designed by the architect Ernest Born for his own use, faces the ocean dunes on a site that is three lots wide and two deep (real estate was cheaper then). The modest two-story wooden structure has two bedrooms, an open kitchen and a double-height living room that looks into the garden, which is planted with stone pine and cypress trees.
Tom Lloyd-Butler, a hedge-fund manager who is the house’s third owner, loved the house exactly as it was — essentially unchanged since Born built it. So when he needed more space to accommodate his two growing sons, himself and his partner, Dan Zelen, who owns Zelen, a design store in Los Angeles, he wanted to tread lightly. He was introduced to Aidlin Darling Design, a local architecture firm, by Steven Miller, who created the comfortable, midcentury-tinged interiors of the original house. “Tom wanted a minimal intervention in the existing house,” says Joshua Aidlin, who designed the addition with David Darling and Michael Hennessey.
The architects came up with a freestanding building that is connected to the existing house at the second floor by a glass-walled bridge. The 1,850-square-foot addition contains a rec room with surfboard storage (this is a family of avid surfers) on the first floor, a master bedroom and bath on the second and a family-media room on the third; each floor is open-plan to maximize light and views. On the windy ocean side, the top two floors offer chances to check out the surf (the dunes block the view from the first floor), while on the garden side, sliding glass doors retract completely, making the structure seem like a giant treehouse.
The Great Highway Residence is one hell of a surf shack. What's more, our sources say it will also appear in the September issue of a certain au courant home design and architecture magazine that shall go nameless. (HINT FOR SURFERS: The mag's name rhymes with Swell.)
The Great Highway Residence isn't open to the public, but if you want to see Aidlin-Darling in action, pay a visit to another one of their recent projects, the delicious Bar Bambino Italian cafe and wine bar in San Francisco's Mission District. Elsewhere, Aidlin Darling have designed a mixed-use building in SoMa that's set to become the city's first commercial LEED Gold sustainable architecture project. Congrats to Josh and all the aesthetes over at Aidlin Darling Design for getting some of the recognition they've long deserved.
LINKS:
Twice as Nice (article on the Great Highway Residence from the July 22, 2007 New York Times Magazine)
(IMAGES: Top: Joshua Aidlin in his home on Potrero Hill, photo by Telstar Logistics. All others: Great Highway Residence by Dwight Eschliman for the New York Times)
Comments