Tracey Taylor

New York Times, May 2 2010

Photo: Thor Swift for the New York Times

Evan Shively was a chef at Postrio, the San Francisco restaurant owned by Wolfgang Puck, when it opened in 1989. The restaurant has since closed, and Mr. Shively now runs Arborica, a salvaged wood mill in Marshall that supplies architects and designers with reclaimed walnut, redwood and cypress with which to fashion floors, tables and doors. He lives next to the mill with his partner, the artist Madeleine Fitzpatrick. Mr. Shively visits the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in Sonoma County regularly because, he said, its mission to preserve and restore native biodiversity mirrors his desire to be a steward of the land. (His words have been edited and condensed.)

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS The center is not an inherently exalted spot. It’s a random Californian hillside not unlike many others, a hardscrabble adobe that, year after year, has been added to and enriched, letting it manifest itself over time. Somebody chose to make it extraordinary, which is what makes it inspiring.

ORIGINS OF THE SPECIES I was a puppy prep cook — just starting out at Oliveto in Oakland — when I discovered this place. I wanted to find the source of some beautiful herbal greens that came into the restaurant.

RHYTHMS OF NATURE I think of myself as under pressure because the logs roll in, and if something is not done with them, they’re lost. But, here, the commitment to the effort is so sustained. They have a seed-saving garden that has to be grown out every five years. I look at all the plants and vegetables here and appreciate the fact that it’s a place that values diversity. When I visit, I see varieties of fava beans and garlic I’ve never seen before. And the flowers are woven in for the aesthetics.

 

Photo: Cutter Capshaw Photography

New York Times, April 7 2010

Michelle Kaufmann, an architect, remembers leading Laura Bush, the first lady, on a personal tour of one of her prefabricated homes, pointing out its on-demand water heater and explaining how the graywater system recycled waste water. It was May 2006, and a full-scale model of Ms. Kaufmann’s Glidehouse design had been erected at the National Building Museum in Washington. It was, Ms. Kaufmann said, one of the high points for her design-build company, mkDesigns.

There were others. The company had its debut with a bang in 2004 when Sunset magazine chose to feature a model of the Glidehouse in its annual Celebration Weekend event in Menlo Park, Calif. An estimated 25,000 people — builders, architects, potential clients — waited in long lines that formed even before the doors opened to see mkDesigns’ modern take on the prefab home. The overwhelming response jump-started the company, which until that point had been a one-woman operation. It seemed like the right idea at the right time.

Ms. Kaufmann immediately hired a client-services manager to handle the hundreds of customer inquiries she began receiving and set to work building her business. “There hadn’t been a precedent for a green preconfigured home,” Ms. Kaufmann said, “and ours struck a chord.” The firm, based in Oakland, Calif., rapidly earned a reputation for its streamlined modular homes and went on to build a total of 53, mostly on the West Coast.

Ms. Kaufmann built more homes than any of the other dozen or so boutique prefab-home companies that have sprung up in the past decade. These include Resolution 4 Architecture in New York, LivingHomes and Marmol Radziner in Los Angeles, andFlatPak in Minneapolis. While most of the firms emphasized custom designs and high-end prices, mkDesigns aimed to reach a middle market with homes that cost $160 to $180 per square foot, not including the site.

Together, the green prefab companies represent a tiny segment of the home construction market, but with their focus on sustainability and affordability, they offer the prospect of genuinely green homes delivered to a mass market — an alternative to cookie-cutter spec houses and bloated McMansions. “Before the economic meltdown, all builders were looking at prefab in one way or another,” said Leo Marmol, founder of Marmol Radziner.

One reason was the success of similar firms outside the United States. Of all the new single-family houses built in Finland last year, for example, 68 percent were wholly or partly prefabricated, and the home building company Sekisui builds approximately 15,000 modular housing units a year in Japan.

Predictability is one attraction. Home parts are made in a controlled environment and assembled on site, often in a matter of days, meaning weather is less of an issue. And prefab buildings produce about 50 to 75 percent less waste than site-built homes.

Ms. Kaufmann’s first challenge was to find factories that would produce the parts necessary to assemble her homes. “Factories wanted high volume,” she said. And some of them did not want to take on the liability of manufacturing green but untested features, like countertops made of recycled paper.

Even when Ms. Kaufmann found factories that would create what she wanted, the alliances didn’t always last. “We found a factory in Canada that worked well for a while,” she said. “But they got a big order to build workers’ camps in Alaska and told us we would have to add six months to our project schedule, and they doubled the fee. Here we were in contract with a client — it was not acceptable for us to pass that on to them.”

In late 2006, Ms. Kaufmann decided she had no choice but to buy or build her own factory. With capital from one of mkDesigns’s partners, the company bought a modular-home factory in Seattle that was rapidly reconfigured to put out 14 homes a year.

To run the factory, Ms. Kaufmann hired away a manager who had been in charge of laptop production and distribution for Hewlett-Packard in Tokyo. This was in line with Ms. Kaufmann’s vision of creating a hybrid company that straddled the line between architecture and product design. “You could compare one of our homes to an iPod — a really well-designed product that can be customized with different skins and applications,” she said.

Having a manufacturing plant changed the game. “It allowed us to design the elements we wanted and to grow,” Ms. Kaufmann said. “We were wearing two hats and the clients were getting a better product.” The factory was so successful that within two years, it became apparent that the company needed another — larger and more sophisticated. “We didn’t start off with the fanciest factory,” Ms. Kaufmann said. “We were in bootstrapping mode.”

At the height of its success, mkDesigns employed 60 people in the design studio and the factory. Ms. Kaufmann attracted a number of investors willing to put up $100 million to help buy half a dozen factories across the United States. In early 2008, before the economy turned, the firm found a plant in Sacramento that it thought would be perfect. Ms. Kaufmann decided to sell the Seattle plant but leased it back and kept production going.

When the economy did turn, the mortgage collapse made it increasingly difficult for clients to obtain loans. With business declining and the housing climate increasingly uncertain, Ms. Kaufmann decided not to buy the Sacramento plant. “We realized others could do the job much more cheaply than us,” Ms. Kaufmann said. Things had changed. Factories that had previously been reluctant to risk manufacturing unfamiliar parts were now phoning Ms. Kaufmann, hungry for work and offering competitive bids.

But then, in quick succession, two factories she had chosen to work with went out of business. One had taken payment of $700,000 for two homes whose parts they had committed to produce, but mkDesigns had to finance the completion of both homes. The other factory left mkDesigns to finish work on homes whose parts were only partly delivered.

In hindsight, Ms. Kaufmann says she believes that one of her company’s main issues was an inability to create economies of scale. She and her partners had hoped that over time, and as the volume of their output grew, they would create more production and time efficiencies and that their costs would fall. Other practitioners have had similar problems.

“Volume is still one of our biggest challenges,” said Todd Jerry, chief operating officer at Marmol Radziner Prefab. Ms. Kaufmann concedes, too, that she was sometimes overly optimistic about production expenses and priced her homes for less than they actually cost.

Last May, she came to the painful realization that while the company might have been able to cope with one challenge, it could not handle all of its difficulties at once: the collapsing housing market, the closing of the two factories, the financial hits. “We need to close,” she told her staff, which had been pruned to 25.

It was a difficult time. “We had all invested so much of ourselves into the mission of making thoughtful, sustainable design accessible,” Ms. Kaufmann said. “Closing was heartbreaking.”

Last September, a fledgling prefab firm, Blu Homes of Boston, bought the rights to build mkDesigns’ preconfigured home models. Bill Haney, co-founder of Blu Homes, said the company had technologies that would allow it to make the homes more affordable. So far, none have been built. Ms. Kaufmann has opened an architectural studio.

A full-scale model of one of Ms. Kaufmann’s homes, an mkSolaire, continues to stand on the grounds of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, a spot that had been occupied previously by only one other house, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Erected in May 2008, Ms. Kaufmann’s home features a solar-electric generation system and a living roof. Its purpose, according to the museum, is to “show consumers what the future may bring.”

San Francisco Chronicle, March 21 2010

Photo of Keba Konte (left) and Eric Maundu by Jessica Pons/San Francisco Chronicle

Unless you are Alice Waters or Barbara Kingsolver, planting and maintaining an edible garden can seem a tad arduous. In her book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” Kingsolver extolled the pleasures of home-grown food, but all the soil amending, weeding and watering - not to mention controlling greedy pests - takes time, effort and, of course, space.

Enter aquaponics, a system of food gardening that has a small but growing fan base, not least because its advantages seem almost too good to be true. An aquaponics installation requires no soil, scant water (2 to 10 percent of what is used in the average vegetable garden), a modest financial outlay and minimal maintenance. There’s no dealing with pesticides, and the system is sustainable and easy to set up. For gardeners conscious of the need to slash their water use during California’s drought, or those with little or no land, this method has a lot to offer.

The cherry on top is that you get to enjoy nurturing a school of pretty fish. Fish can be fed with regular fish food or, eventually, with the fruits of your crop, creating a virtuous circle in which you know precisely what is going into the food you eat. Whether you consider your fish a decorative feature or dinner is up to you.

“My wife and I were blown away when we saw aquaponics for the first time,” says Bob Rudorf, who has a system installed under a grow light in the living room of his Sonoma home and is harvesting baby lettuces and culinary herbs.

Aquaponics combines hydroponics, or water-based planting, with aquaculture, or fish cultivation. The idea is simple: In a closed-loop system, water from a tank full of fish, rich with fish waste, irrigates and feeds plants that grow in a bed of gravel. The plants filter the water, which is then channeled back into the fish tank. The boxed plant bed is typically set at table height to distance it from soil-borne diseases such as the fungi that grow on tomatoes, but there’s another benefit: no need to bend or kneel to tend your plants. Aquatic life can range from goldfish, trout and tilapia to crustacea, frogs and turtles; a simple pump is required to circulate the water. Plants can be grown from seed or as transplants that have been cleaned of soil.

Sustainability in action

Rudorf and his wife, Amelia Belle, discovered aquaponics at the San Francisco Green Festival last fall. Strolling past the exhibits, the couple were disappointed with how little they saw that was truly green. “It screamed commercialism,” Rudorf says. “There were lots of purses made out of recycled candy wrappers.” On an upper level they came upon Oakland aquaponics company Kijiji Grows. “There were these beautiful gardens and blooming flowers,” recalls Rudorf, who decided this was sustainability in action.

Kijiji Grows was started last March by Keba Konte, co-owner of the Guerilla Cafe in north Berkeley, and Eric Maundu, who trained in computer science and industrial robotics. “An aquaponic garden is just one big robot,” he says. The company has worked extensively with children, setting up aquaponic gardens in half a dozen schools and several preschools in Oakland. Maundu says kids are naturally drawn to the simplicity of the gardens and the transparency of how they work.

“Just like with recycling and other sustainable concepts, it’s the kids who are initially energized by the idea, and they pass their enthusiasm on to their parents,” he says.

Kijiji, the Swahili word for village, has also collaborated with Oakland’s Office of Parks and Recreation to create a community garden in Mosswood Park, at the corner of Macarthur Boulevard and Webster Street. In March, their three tabletop beds, one of which uses solar power for its water pump, are bursting with chard, mint, parsley, bok choy and broccoli. The gentle gurgling of the water making its way from the darting goldfish in their black tub to the plants above makes for a soothing aural backdrop.

‘Rains all the time’

Nearby, a number of traditional raised beds tended by neighbors also look abundant, but come the summer months they will require constant irrigation. As Maundu puts it, with aquaponics, “it rains all the time.”

Aquaponic gardens are not as tied to the seasons because they are not tied to the ground. “You can push spring and summer much longer,” Maundu says.

Konte and Maundu bring adults and children to the park to teach them how to create and maintain aquaponic systems. The majority of plants lend themselves to aquaponics, including leafy greens and fruiting and flowering plants. Tuber crops, such as potatoes, are one exception. In the tanks at Mosswood, Kijiji likes to stock goldfish: “Some of the younger children find the whiskered catfish scary,” Maundu says.

Ideal for the poor

Aquaponic systems are ideal for poor communities, here or in developing countries, because they don’t require fertile land, significant water or funding, and in some places families can rely on them for subsistence. Maundu has helped set up installations in Kenya for families who have lost adults to AIDS. In these instances, it is often the family members left behind - children and grandparents - who benefit from a simple aquaponics garden.

“There, it can be a matter of life and death,” Maundu says. It helps that the systems can be built from whatever materials are available locally, be it coconut fibers, rocks, bamboo or wood.

Inka Biospheric Systems, a San Francisco company that produces a variety of aquaponic installations, is looking at how it might provide systems to earthquake-devastated Haiti. Founder Paul Giacomantonio, who started out as a stonemason building fishponds, among other things, and who has worked in Gabon, Senegal and Zimbabwe, says he sees Inka’s “micro farms” as part of an effort to ease poverty.

Inka has created aquaponic gardens at Sanchez Elementary School in San Francisco’s Mission District, and has installed a suspended version of its rotating cylinder garden on the Plastiki, the sailing vessel made of recycled plastic bottles that David de Rothschild intends to sail across the Pacific from San Francisco this year. The garden is clamped onto the vessel’s mizzenmast, and the cylinder is enclosed in a clear covering to create a greenhouse effect and to keep saltwater off the plants.

Inka also has developed a bio-quilt in which seedlings are grown to create vertical walls of plants sustained by water from a fish tank. These are suitable for condo and apartment patios or decks, Giacomantonio says.

In Sonoma, Rudorf is hoping that aquaponic gardens like his may one day be in every public school in the county. “There’s a commitment to put gardens in schools, and it makes sense for them to be aquaponic,” he says. In the meantime, he says his family is deriving a lot of pleasure from their small indoor installation. “It has a function and it is really pretty. And we love just looking at the fish.”

Financial Times, March 20 2010

It is either a vision for a new residential utopia in one of the most beautiful spots in the world or the most ill-conceived plan for a new city for a long time. Opinion is divided on a proposal to transform Treasure Island, a 400-acre man-made outcrop with picture-postcard views of San Francisco, into an environmentally sustainable neighbourhood for up to 24,000 residents.

Its supporters appear to be in the ascendant and the result could, they say, create some of the world’s hottest properties; but whether their dream is fulfilled or not the project has some important lessons as cities throughout the world look to islands, both natural and man-made, to try to solve their expansion, transport and housing problems.

Originally built in 1936 to host the Golden Gate International Exposition, Treasure Island is just a couple of miles offshore from San Francisco and considered within its city limits. It is connected by a small isthmus to Yerba Buena Island, the landing point of the Bay Bridge, the only overland link between San Francisco and the East Bay and its urban hubs of Oakland and Berkeley.

Treasure Island’s flat, windswept terrain is home to about 1,400 residents and many abandoned military buildings, oil facilities and electrical transformers. There is little here to connect the site to the book that inspired its name – the site is named after the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived in San Francisco from 1879 to 1880 – or to suggest the glorious future that is being heralded for it.

Owned by the US Navy, the island was decommissioned in 1996. Last December San Francisco’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, negotiated to buy it in a deal that will see the navy receiving a guaranteed $55m over 10 years from the city, plus an additional $50m if the private investors involved in the project get an 18 per cent return. Newsom is confident the project can be a showcase development, citing the thousands of jobs that will be created and the fact that the money to pay the navy will come from developers, not city coffers. This is a potential sore point for a city that is facing a $522m budget deficit next year.

The proposals are ambitious, particularly in terms of sustainable building – concerns likely to be associated with any island development project and expensive, at an estimated cost of $1.4bn. A master plan developed for the island by architectural and engineering services company Skidmore, Owings and Merrill details up to 8,000 new homes, 30 per cent of which would be affordable to those on lower incomes, several solar-powered skyscrapers, an organic farm, three hotels, several shops and restaurants, a waste-water treatment plant and 300 acres of recreational land. The project’s private development team is a partnership of local company Wilson Meany Sullivan, national homebuilder Lennar Urban and private equity real estate development firm Kenwood Investments.

All of the island’s new streets would be set at a 68° north-south angle in order to minimise wind exposure and two old naval aircraft hangars would be recycled into retail and entertainment centres. Terminal 1, an imposing building featured in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, would be transformed into a ferry terminal.

On the environmental front, roof-top turbines would provide buildings with power and solar heating systems in the residential areas would supply up to 80 per cent of the new neighbourhood’s hot-water needs. San Francisco has already aggressively reduced the amount of rubbish it sends to landfills but it has upped the ante for Treasure Island, aiming to zero-out solid waste by 2020.

With chronic drought affecting cities across California, water conservation is key. A quarter of the island’s treated water would be recycled for irrigating its farm, as well as for flushing toilets in commercial buildings and washing boats in the marina. The island would still get its potable water from the mainland but, through recycling and conservation measures, it is estimated it would use only 218m gallons per year.

Finally, large-scale wind turbines would be installed in the uninhabited area for energy generation.

The design, which comes in the wake of many years of planning, has already earned a number of awards, including an American Institute of Architects National Honor Award and recognition by the Clinton Climate Initiative, former US president Bill Clinton’s greenhouse gas campaign.

However, sceptics question whether it is sensible to develop an island built out of seismically unsafe sand and gravel in an area of the world known for its earthquakes. In addition, conservation experts predict climate change will raise sea levels more than 4½ft by 2100, casting doubts over the wisdom of developing the island and similar sites worldwide.

“These 400 acres are an example of what can happen to 280 sq miles in the greater San Francisco area,” says Will Travis, executive director at the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which has jurisdiction over part of the Treasure Island project. He cites places such as downtown San Francisco, its international airport and the newly developed Mission Bay neighbourhood, which are all built on land susceptible to flooding in future. “The obvious strategy is a planned retreat and certainly not to build anything new,” he says. “But instead we are opting for innovation and to adapt to the sea level rise.” He says the levees that are part and parcel of the development designs will be increased in height over time at no cost to the taxpayer.

His attitude to the seismic issue is similarly bullish. “The Bay Area is a bad place to build anything. But we have learned how to build for earthquakes.” He says the advantage of Treasure Island is that it offers the opportunity to start from scratch with the most up-to-date expertise.

There are also transportation issues. Bart, the region’s subway network, does not stop there and the Bay Bridge provides the only road access. Its east span is currently being replaced and is already over capacity and adding thousands of cars could take it to the brink. Travis points out that the goal is to create a compact, mixed-use residential community which is not car-dependent. “There will be a new ferry terminal and buses to San Francisco and the East Bay. A whole fleet of new ferries is currently under construction,” he adds, and mentions Vancouver, site of the recent winter Olympics, as a model for a transit-focused city.

Ruth Gravanis, an environmental advocate in San Francisco, has been monitoring the designs for Treasure Island since 1996. She is supportive of the proposals and feels they have been improved incrementally over time. “As other cities have introduced green initiatives, it has forced this plan to stay in the vanguard,” she says. She likes the fact that housing units are not automatically being sold or rented with parking spaces included and that amenities for cyclists and pedestrians have been incorporated into the proposals. But she believes that for a project attempting to minimise its carbon footprint, there is still too much space devoted to parking. “But I’m cautiously optimistic. They’ve made lots of good changes,” she says. “At first the ferry was going to go the east side of the island. Now it’s the west. It took them a while but they saw sense in the end.”

If San Francisco can keep the project on track and crunch the numbers to make it work, it seems as if support for the development will help push it through. And with cities consuming 75 per cent of our natural resources, a blank-canvas development such this one might just become a blueprint for new communities the world over.

Insular appeal: The enduring allure of the artificial

San Francisco’s Treasure Island is not the only island that was originally built for an international exhibition. Ile Notre-Dame was built in 10 months – from 15m tons of rocks excavated to create the Montreal metro – for Expo 67, a celebration of Canada’s centennial. Expo 67 is considered to have been the most successful world fair of the 20th century, with more than 50m visitors and 62 nations participating. Today the island hosts the Canadian Formula One Grand Prix and much of the open land is enjoyed by rowers, cyclists and, in the winter, ice skaters.

Perhaps the world’s best known artificial islands are in Dubai, where an ambitious initiative has created the Palm Islands and the World Islands, among others, both of which make a dramatic impression when viewed from the sky. The economic downturn has put a halt to the government’s plans to build more islands and so far only the Palm Jumeirah is inhabited. Celebrities such as actor Brad Pitt and soccer players David Beckham and Michael Owen are among those believed to have bought homes there.

Several of the world’s airports have been sited on artificial islands and when London mayor Boris Johnson announced in 2008 that the city’s Heathrow Airport was a “planning error” and that a new airport should be built on an island on the Thames estuary, he might have had Kansai International Airport in his mind’s eye. Located on an artificial island in the middle of Osaka Bay in Japan, Kansai was designed by architect Renzo Piano and opened in 1994. Twenty years in the planning, it became the most expensive civil works project in modern history – costing in excess of $20bn – not least because it was discovered that the island had sunk eight metres as a result of the weight of the material used in construction.

Other airports on islands include Chubu Centrair International Airport, New Kitakyushu Airport and Kobe Airport, all in Japan. Hong Kong International Airport, designed by Foster & Partners, was created using land reclamation from the existing islands of Chek Lap Kok and Lam Chau.

San Francisco Chronicle, January 13 2010

Photos: Russell Yip/The Chronicle

Who says tech whiz kids don’t have a design sensibility? When Twitter recently moved into its new offices in downtown San Francisco, many of the bright young things who work there were concerned about the decor on their walls. Specifically, they were insistent that a series of cloud decals that had adorned their previous work space - a throwback to an early Twitter logo - should accompany them to their new work space.

Fortunately for them, Sara Morishige Williams, the designer assigned to give the new offices a makeover, and the wife of Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, was more than aware of what was called for, having lived and breathed the Twitter culture since the company started in 2007.

Before anything, however, she had to find offices to accommodate the rapidly expanding team, whose number currently stands at 110 but, given the success of the company’s microblogging service, is likely to grow. Morishige Williams, who has worked on residential interiors but was new to a workplace project, toured a number of spaces that were up for sublease, many of them empty.

Eventually she found sixth-floor offices that had previously been occupied by social-networking site Bebo. A key attraction was that the space had been built out by Brereton Architects a few years ago, which meant Morishige Williams could concentrate on the interiors, as the unit didn’t require any structural changes.

Morishige Williams’ priorities when considering how to give the new space the Twitter imprint revolved around three key issues: familiarity, levity and sustainability.

“Twitter is under an intense spotlight despite being a very young company, but it stays grounded with a culture of humility, empathy and compassion,” she says. “People there care about sustainability and are involved in global issues, so I was careful to take this into consideration with my design and material choices.”

Reception desk re-clad

Morishige Williams says she chose furniture and fittings that would endure, be minimalist and, wherever possible, reuse materials. She started in the vast lobby area by deciding to retain the sweeping reception desk, but give it a new look by having its base re-clad with reclaimed barn wood. She collaborated on this, and several other elements in the work space, with Mark Rogero at Oakland’s Concreteworks. The large Twitter sign on one of the walls in the lobby is made from the same reclaimed barn wood and hot-rolled steel and was fabricated by Lundberg Design.

The lobby also introduces the playful element Morishige Williams was striving for throughout the space. A pair of neon-green deer take pride of place in a corner bay whose giant windows provide stunning views of Yerba Buena Gardens. The animals were garden ornaments when Morishige Williams found them, and somewhat the worse for wear. She repaired and painted them - fixing a pair of real antlers onto one - and the duo accompanied the Twitter team from their former offices. The reception area also features a wall of tree-branch hooks made by John Robohm at Live Wire Farm.

In the open-plan offices themselves, the immediate impression is of natural light and space - neither of which one associates with your typical urban work space. Close inspection reveals a plethora of whimsical design touches - almost all of which have been inspired by nature and the company’s own visual branding.

“I wanted the space to be personal, not unlike a home,” says Morishige Williams. “And I wanted to bring the outdoors in.”

Thus, each of the company’s conference rooms has been named after a bird, and an aluminum cutout of the bird’s silhouette - be it a heron, a skylark or a plover - has been placed on the respective doors.

Concreteworks was commissioned to make another important element for the new space: four outsize conference tables. These were crafted in concrete composed of recycled aggregates, including 40 percent fly ash, and their bases were also clad in barn wood. The piece de resistance is the main conference room’s table, the top inlaid with a scattering of Twitter’s signature bird motifs cut out of white opaque acrylic. Each of the meeting rooms is equipped with extra large whiteboards, because, says Morishige Williams, “everybody here is really into whiteboards.”

The avian theme is repeated on the office’s longest wall, for which Morishige Williams designed a sweep of birds created with custom-made decals. The design was based on a photograph Morishige Williams took of a flock of birds when visiting her father-in-law in snowy Nebraska.

Morishige Williams says she was fortunate that the space’s existing carpet, a striped prism pattern on a black background, was nice enough to keep. She matched colors in the carpet for the walls, which were painted in low-VOC paints. The tones range from robin’s-egg blue to icy green. To create contrast, one wall has been painted dark gray.

Focus on comfort

“In the design of Twitter’s space, I wanted community spaces to have elements of a comfortable living room, where people could escape their desks yet continue working,” says Morishige Williams. With this in mind, many areas in the Twitter headquarters have been given over to comfortable seating.

Morishige Williams chose furniture that, while stylish, was also functional and offered value for money. All the meeting-room chairs are recyclable and stackable. The chairs used in the dining area are the Jake model from Room & Board. As well as in-house lunch, Twitter employees are offered regular teatimes. “Google has its TGIF get-togethers - we have tea,” says Morishige Williams.

Many of the sofas were custom-made by San Francisco company Furniture Envy, which will make pieces to order. Close to the DJ booth that the company inherited sits a row of Chiquita stools by Kenneth Cobonpue. With their seats made of natural rattan poles, they are visually striking but surprisingly comfortable.

Time was in short supply for Morishige Williams, both because the move happened quickly and because it coincided with the birth of her first child. One aspect she knew would make a significant impact was lighting, so she tackled that early on, switching out unattractive fixtures in favor of pendants and shades that cast a warm glow. It proved a relatively easy way to make the space more inviting.

But her finishing touch is perhaps the most telling. In order to make the staff feel welcome in the new work environment, Morishige Williams commissioned small Throwboy pillows for each employee, which were placed on their chairs on their first day in the new offices. Embroidered on each are the words “Home Tweet Home.”

“Sara has successfully translated the essential qualities of Twitter,” says Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. “There is a deep acknowledgment of openness in the layout, and crafty nods toward thinking green with the use of reclaimed barn wood and concrete tabletops made of recycled glass. Technology is driven by nature, by people pushing it in clever new directions, and Sara gets that. …

“The space we occupy in San Francisco is where we hope to do our best work. Sara’s instinct and attention to detail helps inspire us to do just that.”

San Francisco Chronicle, January 3 2010

Photo: Leger Wanaselja Architecture

Maybe it’s the gate made entirely from silver Volvo station wagon doors. Or the doorway awnings, which, in a former life, were hatchbacks on Porsches and Mazdas. Or the white picket fence - it’s made out of green and white road signs, as are railings for the home’s stairs and its light fixtures.

If you’ve cruised the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and Dwight Way in Berkeley, you’ve seen this home. It’s hard to miss. At a minimum, this nine-unit condo development is an attention-grabber.

These repurposed street signs and car parts were intended to add levity and intrigue to the home’s visual landscape. They also helped to add buzz. As soon as the project was completed in February 2004, curious residents and architectural critics alike wanted a peek.

More than 500 people turned up to the property’s first open house, according to Cate Leger, a principal at Berkeley architecture firm Leger Wanaselja, which designed and built the condos.

It turns out the eye-catching sustainable elements visible from the street are just the tip of the iceberg. These units are green to their core, featuring everything from passive solar power systems to recycled glass terrazzo kitchen counters. This becomes clear when one takes a tour of the now for sale second-floor condo at 2474 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, currently priced at $520,000.

Vu Nguyen became the unit’s second owner when he bought the two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo in 2006. Nguyen visited 114 open houses before finding this home - he kept count using a database. But here, he was smitten.

“Nothing compares,” Nguyen said. “I was immediately drawn to the 10-foot ceilings, all the natural light and the loft-like feel of the place,” adding that he preferred the open feel of the lower floor, including the fact that the second bedroom and bathroom are located there, allowing for clear separation and privacy for his roommate.

Ironically, given the building’s impeccable green credentials, Nguyen’s first impressions did not relate to sustainability. But it didn’t take long for him to appreciate the home’s attention to eco-friendly details - most notably a $30 monthly heating bill. Nguyen was also impressed by the quality of the condo’s finishes, particularly the solid construction interior doors.

The condo features polished concrete floors, off-white plaster walls and cream carpeting on the stairs. The kitchen, with its counters, doors and sills handcrafted from salvaged wood and recycled glass, takes up a corner of the living area. The back bedroom/office has personality, featuring slanted half walls and a deep, angular bay window. The full bathroom boasts salvaged glass shelves.

A large skylight is positioned at the top of the two-tone wood and steel staircase and provides lots of natural light as well as natural ventilation. A good-size, low-maintenance deck with views of the East Bay hills and the bay leads off the master bedroom, which also has a full in-suite bathroom.

Nguyen, who is moving so he can accommodate his parents in a larger home, has grown to love some of the home’s finer details, such as the gently tapered, smooth wooden post in his main living and kitchen area, which was fashioned from a tree on the site, and a small alcove with a hefty shelf made of reclaimed wood.

The gated units were built on an infill site, requiring the remodeling of a turn-of-the-century corner store and the new construction of a mixed-use building next door.

Leger said she and Karl Wanaselja, her husband and partner at Leger Wanaselja, had noble ambitions when they designed the residences. Their goal was to use time-tested methods to minimize energy use and to rely heavily on salvaged, recycled and low-toxic finishes. A total of 3 1/2 tons of street signs were used inside and outside the buildings. “We are very proud of this project,” she said. “It’s a great example of green architecture.”

Other measures that contribute to reducing the condo’s environmental impact include the use of blown-in cellulose insulation (made from old telephone books and newspapers) instead of fiberglass, and substituting 50 percent of the cement in the concrete with fly ash (a byproduct of coal burning).

The building won a slew of awards and was featured in Dwell magazine, which quipped, “With its overtly green approach, it seems a perfect architectural summation of [Berkeley's] values.”

New York Times, December 26, 2009

Novella Carpenter is a writer, urban farmer and Dumpster diver. Her memoir, “Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer,” chronicles her life on her small homestead near downtown Oakland. Ms. Carpenter, who studied journalism under Michael Pollan at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, also helps run a biodiesel station in Berkeley, where she teaches chicken and rabbit rearing classes. She is working on her second book. (Her words have been edited and condensed).

Photo: Josh Haner, New York Times.

UP WITH THE CHICKENS I get up at 7:30 to feed the chickens who gather on my back stairs and make a racket. Then I milk my goat, Bebe, while listening to NPR. All the days seem about the same. I do not have a weekend-centric, T.G.I.F. lifestyle.

PICK-ME-UP I drink a very strong cup of Lapsang Souchong, a smoky black tea. I call it bacon tea. I’m sure I’ll end up getting cancer from drinking it: they make it by roasting tea leaves over burning pine. I drink it with honey from my bees and goat milk from Bebe. I eat later — some figs from the tree, or some tomatoes, maybe a big salad from the garden.

MANUAL LABOR I do farm chores: milking, checking on the rabbits, collecting a few eggs from the chickens. They don’t lay as much as they used to. I need to cull them, but they are so old they are just not appetizing. Sometimes I’ll go to my office in Oakland and write. Sometimes I have a lot of farm work. The big chores are mucking out the goat yard, which can get really smelly. I’m often making something like cheese or sauerkraut, so I have to flip the cheese or change the brine water for any olives I’m curing.

EXPEDITIONS Bill, my partner, and I might plan a seasonal activity like olive picking in Davis, strawberry picking or tomato harvesting. Or we might go sailing or just have a picnic on Bill’s totally grubby boat. It’s a 21-foot sailboat that one of his customers gave him. It’s fun to sit on while the sun goes down.

DIVING FOR DINNER At night, Bill and I will often go into San Francisco to see a movie at the Red Vic or eat at our favorite Indian place, Shalimar in the Tenderloin. The real reason for going to San Francisco, though, is Rainbow Grocery. Sometimes we shop there, but mostly we wait until the store closes and the Dumpster comes out. We’re mostly there for the animals: the goats love the cabbage leaves, the bunnies love the bruised apples and fennel stalks. But we often find stuff for us to eat, too, like yogurt or bananas. Rainbow is great because they put the good, edible stuff in boxes within the Dumpster, so it’s easy to find and doesn’t get dirty.

A BOOK AND BED I go to bed around 11 or 12. I usually read in bed until I fall asleep.

Financial Times, November 21, 2009

Photos: Tracey Taylor

Shortly after Jane Martin ripped up part of the concrete pavement in front of her home in San Francisco’s Mission District and planted a small garden, a police cruiser drove by and the officer leaned out of the window. “I give you two weeks before one of your windows is broken,” he said, pointing at the small river rocks Martin had used to cover the plant bed.

Her windows remained intact, however, and her garden thrived. In fact it attracted the attention of the local community and passers-by for positive reasons. People stopped to chat when she was out weeding and several neighbours asked her how they might go about planting their own front-of-house gardens.

Indeed this modest patch of succulents, evergreens and native flowers in one of the city’s densest neighbourhoods became the launch-pad for an ambitious greening project that has seen significant expanses of pavement replaced with gardens across San Francisco.

Martin, a landscape architect with her own practice, Shift Design Studio, had turned bare paving into an oasis of urban greenery before. A year or so earlier she effected a similar transformation on a 14ft-deep pavement in front of her former studio on Shotwell Street, a few blocks north of her current home. Fed up with the cavalier attitude taken by drivers who mounted the curb to overtake or even to park right outside her window, she decided to take action. “I was almost run over three times when stepping out of my door,” she says.

In San Francisco pavements are city property but it is the responsibility of the adjacent property owner to maintain the area directly in front of their homes. Martin soon discovered, however, that making any significant changes to the paving involved negotiating a complex web of red tape. “I persevered but I wouldn’t recommend going through that process to anyone else. It was onerous,” she says.

Then a problem in her neighbourhood’s combined sewer system proved serendipitous. It led the city’s mayor, Gavin Newsom, to see the advantages of introducing more permeable landscaping: the logic being that the more rain that goes into the ground, the less likely it is that sewers will become over-capacitated. With the support of the mayor’s office, Martin drafted a new, simple permit that allows residents to apply to landscape their pavements for a reasonable cost. The maximum one-off fee is $215 but this decreases to $160 when several households band together.

Lisa Zahner decided to do something about her rubbish-strewn pavement after picking up one discarded drinks can too many in front of her San Francisco home. Zahner lives on a busy street close to Alamo Square, a popular tourist destination due to its collection of Victorian “Painted Lady” houses. Her pavement was commandeered by pedestrians, dog walkers and cyclists and people stopping by at the bodega on the corner would routinely leave a trail of litter outside her front door.

Before she began the project Zahner asked her neighbours whether she could plant some of the space in front of their properties and offered to pay for the work herself. Several decided to get involved and the result was 65ft of landscaping and two extra tree wells on the street corner.

Zahner admits the plan stalled when the estimate for pulling up the 100-year-old paving came in. “It was more than $2,000,” she recalls. “I phoned my husband to see what he thought and he said: ‘What we put out in cash we will recoup in goodwill’. He was right. The response has been overwhelmingly positive.”

Although she originally envisaged a sea of wildflowers, these didn’t take well and the bed outside Zahner’s home is now a profusion of hardy, native plants that need little watering. There are Douglas Irises, various grasses, daisies, yarrows and a huge Acacia tree. “I love looking out of the window and seeing plants and grasses rather than concrete,” says Zahner. “But it’s more than that. We’ve got to know many more people – neighbours, regular dog-walkers and others who just stop to talk about the flowers.”

As a near-neighbour of Martin’s in the Mission, Anne Wintroub found inspiration close at hand and she helped orchestrate a community planting project that brought together 20 local homeowners. Martin helped to mentor the group but insisted that the participants should do the lion’s share of the work. “We spent evenings together working on the permit, choosing plants and applying for a grant to help fund it all,” says Wintroub. “The co-ordinated approach paid off because we had real buy-in from everyone involved.”

Today half of Wintroub’s block boasts drought-tolerant pavement landscaping and she says the effects have been palpable. The garage door that used to be a graffiti canvas has remained untarnished for months and neighbours who met while working on the planting keep an eye out for one another. “This has made people much more respectful of the neighbourhood,” she says.

There have been more than 500 applications from San Franciscans to turn paving into micro-gardens in the three years since Martin helped usher in the new sidewalk landscaping permit. Martin has also launched PlantSF a volunteer body to help promote permeable landscaping in the city. The many residential projects have been mirrored on public spaces such as traffic islands and street meridians with the help of initiatives such as the city-backed Pavements to Parks organisation. Martin estimates that in the past five years more than 15,000 sq ft of concrete along pavement and street meridians have been converted into sustainable gardens.

This greening of the urban landscape has proved beneficial on many levels, as well as the obvious aesthetic one. It has brought a sense of community into areas where neighbours might not have known each other before; the permeable landscaping creates a habitat for birds, butterflies and other wildlife; it reduces global warming by absorbing heat rather than reflecting it; anecdotal evidence suggests it has helped reduce crime; and local estate agents say the gardens are helping to boost property values.

Martin’s own pavement garden on Harrison Street has expanded to include a bulb of paving that juts out on the corner of her street as a traffic calming measure. Previously a magnet for the illegal dumping of old furniture and garbage, it is now a beautiful small park where locals such as Carlos Lopez, who has lived in the Mission for more than 20 years, stop by to pull out some weeds or sit on one of the built-in benches to chat to neighbours.

The planting includes purple Hibiscus, sage, lavender, Torch lilies and Californian poppies, which attract bumble bees and hummingbirds. “It was design by potluck,” Martin says. “Over time people have brought cuttings or flowers from their own gardens.” In one planter someone has hung a couple of translucent baubles that catch the sun in the breeze. Half embedded in the soil nearby is a toy dinosaur.

For Martin, whose mother was a gardener and who grew up with a large garden in suburban Iowa, this is how it should be. “I see the earth as potential. And it seems strange to me to seal off all that potential under concrete,” she says.

San Francisco Chronicle, November 8 2009

Photos: Mike Kepka/The Chronicle

Unlike the architect whose house has a perpetually leaking roof, or the cobbler whose shoes need mending, Michael Pollan has a new garden that speaks of a professional who practices what he preaches. For the author and journalism professor - who has almost single-handedly set the national agenda on food production and, in books such as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food,” advocated vigorously for fresh, locally produced food - has a front yard that is at once pleasing to the eye, environmentally responsible and very productive.

When Pollan and his wife, artist Judith Belzer, moved to a new home in Berkeley three years ago, they inherited a garden with good intentions but flawed execution. Sited in front of the house, and measuring barely 600 square feet, its design had attempted to accommodate five separate gates leading variously to the street, the driveway, a bike shelter and a side entrance.

Although a kidney-shaped plant bed had been established, the principal element was a curved pathway that swept visitors in and then directly out of the yard, largely ignoring both the generous front porch entrance to the home and the French doors leading into what is now a beautifully renovated kitchen.

“Circulation was definitely an issue,” says Pollan, who adds that the area is also heavily trafficked. “It was important that we had a kitchen garden, but we also wanted it to be beautiful - it’s where guests come in, and we walk through it all the time to take out the trash or compost.”

While the family hoped the modest, fenced-in yard could serve as a place for social gatherings, there were to be no airs and graces. Belzer in particular stressed that the area should not be too stylized - rather she favored a lush but relaxed setting where the couple, their teenage son and their friends would want to spend a lot of time.

Conceding that it was a tall order, the couple asked Bernardo Lopez, a Berkeley landscape designer who has earned a reputation for good-looking gardens that do more than nod to environmental concerns, to rethink the space.

Lopez began by imposing some structure on the hexagonal-shaped space to delineate areas by function and to improve the garden’s flow. A black basalt stone patio, edged in a crescent of Cor-Ten steel, was laid adjacent to the kitchen to create an outdoor eating area. An existing cement wall was used to anchor a deep recycled redwood bench that provides additional opportunities for sitting or lounging.

Steps from the patio lead down into a courtyard, at the heart of which are three beautiful raised beds crafted in Ipe wood and currently bursting with late-season produce. Sand-colored pathways created with crushed decomposed granite, and edged in steel, lead visitors seamlessly around the beds to the home’s different entrances.

A bench for bags

For those arriving from the driveway, perhaps with groceries, a second redwood bench has been judiciously sited in a spot that provides a convenient place to put down heavy bags. It also creates a naturally demarcated route to the kitchen.

On a late-autumn day, the beds are filled with bountiful peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, chard, kale, mustard greens, broccoli, spinach, romaine lettuce and arugula. Lopez says that over the summer, sunflowers and sweet corn plants soared to dizzying heights, as if in competition to reach the sky.

Herbs sown in planters supplement those growing in the beds and include basil, parsley and cilantro. Pots of mint, lemon verbena and lemon balm have been placed close to the house for easy access when preparing teas and infusions.

The raised beds have been designed to double as seating, and they surround a central circular space whose centerpiece is a large antique Indian cooking vessel, which Lopez and Pollan bought on a shopping spree in Sonoma. Pollan says they regularly grill food outside now. In fact, he is planning to cook a suckling pig there when a friend and fellow writer comes to town in a couple of weeks. He is also exploring having a rotisserie element tailor-made to augment his chef’s arsenal.

Lopez has planted every remaining square foot of the yard with a generous assortment of beautiful, drought-resistant plants. “It was a given we wanted to preserve water, and we chose Bernardo partly because he understands xeriscaping so well,” Pollan says.

There are succulents, many of them South African in origin, and several varieties of grasses. Lopez uses repetition in the plants and materials he chooses. He says, it helps to create a dialogue in a garden and convey a sense of cohesiveness.

Stylish in winter, too

He also has an eye for plants that look good year round. “Flowers can come and go in a few weeks,” he says. “But there are many plants whose shapes, leaves and coloring are stunning in their own right.”

A few of the garden’s highlights include a chartreuse gooseberry hybrid, Senecio mandraliscae with its distinctive curved finger-like leaves, a Melianthus major with its spiked reddish-brown blooms and lime-hued foliage, several types of Leucadendrons, some saw-tooth-edged Banksias, Eryngium giganteum, or sea holly, from the thistle family and a fleshy Kalanchoe whose home is a striking Cor-Ten steel planter.

Lopez showed the same appreciation for the architecture of plants in the way he pruned back the foliage on the lower trunks of two existing climbing plants: a South African honeysuckle that wraps itself languorously over one of the garden’s Craftsman-style trellises; and a lovely wisteria that adorns the home’s facade. He took out a rampant climbing passion flower on the principle that, sometimes, “less is more.”

The yard already boasted persimmon and fig trees, and Lopez added an apricot tree that is espaliered in front of a window to provide shade and privacy.

The overall palette is subtle: a blend of silvers and salmons, sages and gray-greens with the occasional shot of muted color such as the icy pink artichoke-like flowers on an exotic-looking protea.

“Design is not a nonstop train. We added some elements as we worked and got to know the garden,” says Lopez, who introduced some space that wasn’t on the original blueprint to ensure the courtyard didn’t feel crowded.

The result has exceeded all of Pollan and Belzer’s expectations. “We love spending time there,” Pollan says. “And when we have parties, guests always want to linger in the garden - we can’t persuade them to come inside. We couldn’t be happier.”

San Francisco Chronicle, September 30 2009

Photos: Frederic Larson

Like “Tuscan palazzo” or “Provencal villa,” “Storybook house” is a delightful real estate label whose reality rarely lives up to its moniker. Pay a visit to Julie and Gerry Gorham’s home on Fernwood Drive in Oakland, however, and that “Storybook” label barely begins to cover the charm of their beautifully restored 1924 cottage.
The impression begins with a walk over the property’s romantic bridge spanning Temescal Creek and a view of the house, nestled in a beautiful garden with a cascading waterfall, a sea of green and white planting and a grouping of magnificent old oaks.

The Gorhams bought the two-bedroom home - which is on Sunday’s Oakland Heritage Alliance Houses of Fernwood tour in the Montclair district - 13 years ago. At the time it was, they say, “a wreck.” But Julie Gorham had coveted it for some time. The couple are serial remodelers - over the years they have refurbished and lived in 14 homes across the Bay Area - but they always had a special place in their hearts for Montclair.

“I had walked past this house many times and admired the garden, which was kept fastidiously neat by its owner,” Julie Gorham says. “But the house had suffered lots of abuse. There was so much to do.”

Clear vision

From the beginning, Gorham had a clear vision of how the home should look. Although she says she’s not a designer, she spent many years immersed in the world of interior design - 14 working at San Francisco’s Decorator Showcase - and is skilled when it comes to pulling together a look. Combine that with her love of the French rustic style, a passion for antiques and a commitment to sensitive restoration, and the result is a veritable jewel of a house.

The Storybook architectural style was popularized in 1920s England and the United States and echoes Hollywood design sometimes known as Fairy Tale or Hansel and Gretel. Architects who worked in this genre in the Bay Area include W.R. Yelland, W.W. Dixon and Carr Jones. Characteristics include turrets with conical roofs, swaybacked rooflines, sloped walls and round-topped doors.

The Fernwood neighborhood boasts one of the most concentrated collections of Storybook houses in the country, and both Montclair’s library and its firehouse are built in this style.

Another feature of these homes is their size. The couple have never been drawn to large houses, and this one is no exception.

“It has everything you need,” Gorham says, “a living room, dining room and study. Why does anyone want a mausoleum where half the rooms are never used?”

Originally a modest one-bedroom cottage, the house had an addition built on the rear, probably in the 1930s. Given the house’s condition, the couple decided they needed to strip it to its skeleton, except for the pretty bay window on the front. The result was so extreme that not long after the major work began, the Gorhams’ son stopped by and asked them where they had put the house.

They installed heating, double-paned windows and several sets of French doors; had all the walls refinished in a thin-wall plaster; and introduced lots of curves, which are typical to this style of home.

“Everything was so square,” Gorham says.

There are now several open archways instead of doors, rounded moldings and even a porthole-style window.

The original railing on the stairs leading from the double-height living room up to the second floor looked like a picket fence, Gorham says. She commissioned a friend of a friend to create an undulating one in Douglas fir to be more in keeping with the whimsical Storybook style. Salvaged wood was used to make exposed joists to complement the existing ceiling beams. These were finished with intricate metalwork designed by Eric Clausen, the Oakland master blacksmith.

The home’s imposing fireplace is made with clinker bricks - the discolored and distorted kind once often rejected by craftsmen but now coveted for their distinctiveness. There’s a small book-lined study where the couple read and watch TV.

“Sometimes we get all the family in here,” Gorham says. “It’s cozy but nice.”

Just enough space

Gorham returns to the question of size when recalling a house she lived in San Ramon. “It was so big you could fit this entire house in its living room,” she says. “Who needs all that space?”

With a new sage green and marble kitchen, the house was coming together beautifully. The icing on the cake was some new furnishings, and for this Gorham embarked on two shopping trips, one to France, the other to England.

Accompanied by a designer friend, she headed for a vintage fabric shop housed in a Cotswolds manor house and the antiquarian flea market in Paris, among other places. The expeditions yielded a distressed bibliothèque used to store crockery in the kitchen, an elegant secretary in the living room and a grand old armoire in the master bedroom. She bought two ironwork chandeliers from a man sitting on the curb in France and added to her collection of miniature military hats at a specialist shop near the Louvre museum.

Perhaps Gorham’s favorite purchase was the 19th century tapestry that she bought on the Paris trip and that hangs on a dining room wall.

All the soft furnishings in the home have been chosen to be comfortable as well as stylish.

“We don’t like stiff and formal,” Gorham says. “We want our grandchildren to have fun when they are here.”

All of the homes on the Oakland Heritage Fernwood Tour are small and intimate. Many of their owners have lived there for decades and raised families there - with no notion of needing extra bathrooms, media or family rooms. This and the thoughtful way these robustly built homes have been maintained and preserved serve as a reminder that the concept of living modestly and sustainably, while back in vogue, is hardly a new invention.