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Behind an unassuming exterior (save for
a three-car garage) lies a contemporary
masterpiece designed by Luke Ogrydziak and Zoë Prillinger
Modern architecture has always been a hard sell in
San Francisco. Witness the hue and cry over Herzog and de Meuron’s
pierced-copper design for the de Young Museum
(now considered a success) and Rem Koolhaas’s airy steel
facade for a Prada store (never built, due to the double whammy
of 9/11 and the dot-com implosion). Nowhere is the opposition
to modern design more intense than in the city’s close-knit
neighborhoods, where the very mention of a contemporary house
brings forth the residents, en masse, calling meetings and waving
petitions. As one embittered homeowner said, “My neighbors
didn’t know the difference between International Style
and the International House of Pancakes.”
As a result, the building permit process is often long and agonizing,
and
further complicated by the fact that new construction generally
requires the razing of an old building or constructing on a precipitous
lot that would be considered unbuildable in less hilly, less
crowded communities.
Nevertheless, it does happen occasionally that a modern house
is completed. One example is the residence called the T-house,
which clings to a steep hillside south of Noe Valley. (The
T refers to the shape of the home, whose rectangular lot
has a small area of flat ground on top, then widens as it
drops dramatically down the hill.)
The street-facing facade of the house—a
2006 American Institute of Architecture, East Bay, merit award
winner—is fairly
modest and opaque, giving little hint of the 5,700-square-foot
edifice behind. (This being
San Francisco, the most astonishing aspect of the front of
the house is the three-car garage and the motor court for
nine additional cars.) It is only once you are inside that
you become aware of the horizontal expanse of Frank Jernigan
and Andrew Faulk’s
home. Walls of floor-to-ceiling glass reveal a 180-degree view
that sweeps from the northeast through downtown’s jagged
skyline and south past Monster Park and the Bay shore; distant
views of the East Bay are visible in the background. The house
is, essentially, a panoramic lens.
The top floor is comprised mainly of an entrance hall and
two spacious decks, one with a spa and one displaying sculpture.
An open staircase leads down to the living area. Although
this floor contains the living room, dining room, kitchen,
a media room, and an outside terrace, there are few walls.
The architects even added a couple of columns to define
the living room. “We
didn’t really need the pillars structurally,” explains
Luke Ogrydziak, AIA, who
designed the house with his partner Zoë Prillinger, “but
we used them to
define the space and give it a certain scale, as well as
a sense of intimacy.”
“One of the nicest surprises about the house was that the
space turned out to be such a perfect setting for benefit concerts,” says
Jernigan. Eighty chairs fit into the room without a problem when
jazz pianist Fred Hersch gave a performance, spotlighted against
the glittering lights of the city.
Down one more level, the rooms include two bedroom suites
and two art studios: one for Jernigan, a former software
engineer who is now studying painting, the other for Faulk,
a retired physician turned artist whose broken-glass works
are exhibited at Linda Fairchild Contemporary Art. Both
studios open out on a narrow slice of lawn bordered by
small trees.
Both men had to adjust to living in such a large and open
house; each had moved from a smaller, older residence in
San Francisco. On the day they moved in, Faulk found himself
sitting in one of the house’s smallest spaces, a low-ceilinged inglenook
in front of the second-floor fireplace. “Frank found me
sitting here on one of the benches and said, ‘Why are you
sitting there?’ I said, ‘I’m not used to so
much wide open space,’ ” Faulk recalls.
Although their first instinct was to put up window
coverings, the pair soon realized that the house, for
all its exposure and glass, is fairly distant from
other windows around them. Now they delight in the
ever-changing views. “I never thought
I would live in a place where I could watch fireworks displays
without getting out of bed,” Faulk says with a grin. “Last
Fourth of July, I counted 10 different displays.”
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