Translucense House

Fougeron Architecture designed a single-family house in Potrero Hill area with views of the San Francisco Bay.

Fougeron Architecture's design brings clarity and openness to the home by taking an almost surgical approach, retaining essential structural elements while introducing new features. A series of interventions break apart the existing box, rewriting the relationships and connections between rooms. Glass and natural light both diffuse and hold together the composition, defining scenes throughout the house that explore perceptions of inside/outside, private/public, and light/dark as well as materiality. An existing two-story volume, once dominated by a bulky staircase, is opened up to create a more befitting entry way and a flexible lounge for the home. A brown-glass stair and bridge float within this space connecting levels and rooms, and adding a dimension of light and color. The brown glass, which evokes the modern-era origins of the home, shifts from solid to transparent with the changing light each day.

Around this lounge extend two wings of living space: a guest room and child’s play room on one side while a living area sit opposite.

The upper floor is expanded and refined. The master suite is reimagined as a singular, light-filled volume extending the full depth of the floor to the outdoors.

A curved glass shower pushes beyond the envelope of the house and into the screened front balcony—a secretly provocative gesture to the street below. In this space in particular the play of privacy and views, light and shadow, recall California’s Light and Space art movement to which the design pays homage.