Times change, empires rise and fall, but the steam-age brick industrial building endures. Dating from the 1860s, San Francisco’s Oriental Warehouse originally served a steamship company in the Asia trade. “At the time it was built, it was actually on the waterfront,” says architect Robert Edmonds (landfill later pushed the shoreline a block away). During the mid-1990s dot-com construction surge, the building was converted to residential use. Now, as a second digital boom raises the bar on San Francisco real estate higher still, Edmonds has followed suit. His gut retrofit elevates this Oriental Warehouse loft from builder-grade to full-on custom, while highlighting the historic character of the original building.
Openness governs the floor plan. The client, a young professional with contemporary tastes, presented a fairly simple program: a one-bedroom dwelling with plenty of display space for his substantial art collection. Edmonds responded by going back to basics. “We stripped it down to the bare bones on the inside,” says the architect. “The approach was to take everything down to what we wanted to keep—brick, timber, and concrete—and build it back in a way that was as light as possible.”
With the exception of a full bath (which doubles as a powder room), the main floor plan is entirely open, with living and dining areas sharing a double-height space and the kitchen tucking under the heavy beams that support the mezzanine above. The mezzanine level is more open still, with a sleeping area that overlooks the living room and a bathroom that borrows daylight from the larger space via a room-width glass shower wall. A two-story span of storefront glazing fills the unit’s south-facing wall, but the apartment is otherwise landlocked, Edmonds explains, “so we tried to get light back as far as we could.”
Construction details perform a disappearing act. General contractor Ralph May’s crew wrapped the edge of the mezzanine in black sheet metal, creating a bold, clean demarcation between the two levels. Elsewhere, the guiding principle was to replace the heavy, opaque assemblies of the 1990s renovation with materials that range from light to virtually invisible. A spare steel staircase (see sidebar, page 42) climbs to the loft, which is lined with frameless glass guardrails. Cove lighting fills vertical reveals between new, painted walls and the existing brick and concrete surfaces, which are left bare. “The approach,” Edmonds says, “was to amplify the things we liked: the industrial nature, the heaviness of the existing walls and timber framing.” Its result is to make a sense of the overall volume available from every corner of the apartment—even the shower.
The minimalist strategy maximized wall space available to display art. “One of our tasks was to curate his art and decide where to put it,” says Edmonds, who left the living room’s two-story east wall as an unbroken expanse of concrete. He organized the opposite wall as a four-bay gallery, using two low drawer units—stock furniture pieces from Italy—to project the composition into the room. Edmonds repeated the flat, boxlike shape at one wall bay as a wall-hung surround for a flat-screen television. “It’s just made out of drywall and metal studs,” he says. “We wanted the TV to look more integral to the house.”
The original building always reads through. While asserting its own character and reflecting its era, the new work clearly defers to the apartment’s structural shell. The kitchen—with paint-grade cabinets in glossy white and a subtly grained granite counter and backsplash—looks as if it were slid into place as a single unit. Millwork in the bathrooms and dressing area floats against the brick of the original warehouse and the concrete party wall that was added when the building was converted to residential units. By making clear the sequence of interventions, the strategy honors the building’s long history. And by exposing the strong and solid way it was created, Edmonds says, the project conveys “this idea of architecture that you really see.”
