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Into the Light

Big Plans for a Little House

    Julie and Chuck Palley chose to overlook the faults of their nondescript 1940s house in the Oakland Hills when they moved into the home in 1989. They didn’t let the home’s small, dark rooms, disjointed floor plan and lack of storage bother them. After all, they had their 2-year-old son to tend to, a neighborhood full of friends and a choice spot at the peak of the street’s knoll to distract them.
    However, when the family expanded with the arrival of their second son, they knew their tight quarters would need to grow as well. The two bedrooms were on different levels, accessed by way of an awkward staircase/landing in the kitchen. The downstairs master bedroom had an additional, poorly placed doorway by the front door that chopped up the room with multiple openings, and lacked privacy from the entryway.
    The design of the living and dining rooms was equally uninspired, as the two rooms were cut off from each other by a long stretch of wall with a narrow passage to the kitchen.
    “Even though the layout of the house didn’t fit our needs, we never wanted to move,” says Julie Palley. “We just needed a better way to live in it.”
  
 After 12 years there, the couple turned to architect Rebecca Schnier of Oakland for help. “We heard of Rebecca through a friend who’s a structural engineer. She was the first architect we met with, and when we heard her ideas for our house, we didn’t meet with anyone else,” notes Julie Palley.
    “I used to work in Manhattan during the 1980s,” says Lafayette native Schnier, a Columbia grad who started her architectural career in Zurich, Paris and New York before returning to the East Bay in the 1990s. “The big thing back then was adding to penthouses, where every inch mattered, and focusing on natural light and views. As a result, my strength is in creative floor planning and the artful manipulation of natural light.”

    When the Palleys showed Schnier their little house with big problems, the architect saw a great opportunity to address the house’s poor layout and lack of light, in addition to adding square footage. With that, the team—which included local contractor Peter Bilbao and structural engineer Jack Rafferty—set out to overhaul the entire structure, with nary a wall left untouched.
    While the upstairs addition added 900 square feet to the house’s existing 1,975-square-foot structure, the downstairs was completely repurposed, effectively making a new house. Schnier cut out a large portion of the wall between the living and dining room to create an open niche for art and widened the existing passage with a broader archway, so the once-dark dining room is now filled with natural light from the abundant, view-providing windows of the living room. Additionally, the new stairway feeds not from the kitchen but from a generous landing in the dining room, producing an airy feel and capturing that same plentiful light and glorious view.
    The problematic downstairs bedroom, once chopped up with multiple entrances and within prominent view of the front door, was cleverly turned into an office/den. To accomplish this, Schnier closed up both doorways and created a new, single doorway off the dining room by way of an eye-catching sliding “barn door” full of frosted glass, simultaneously offering light and privacy. Playing with different kinds of glass and laminated materials with varying opaque qualities is one of Schnier’s trademarks. “These materials are so versatile and greatly underused in most homes,” she says.  
    With the expansion of the second story to create a master suite, a key consideration was taking full advantage of the dramatic three-bridge views of the San Francisco Bay from this hilltop spot. Schnier strategically placed the suite in the northwest corner of the house so that the bedroom, its western wall filled almost entirely with windows, captures the full breathtaking effect. Additionally, thanks to the bedroom’s dynamic angles, spacious corner balcony, high cathedral ceilings, ample built-in storage and plush window seating, Julie Palley admits, “I have a hard time leaving my bedroom and going to work in the morning.”
    The kitchen remodel, which was the final phase of the house’s construction, was just completed this year and was designed to be as green as possible. Featuring recycled glass Terrazzo flooring, low-VOC paint, bamboo cabinets and state-of-the-art appliances, the kitchen is easy on the Earth and easy for the home chef to use. In keeping with the art-niche and opaque-window themes in the rest of the house, Schnier designed another niche for the kitchen, tiled in green glass and set into floor-to-ceiling bamboo cabinets opposite the stove and sink. To add a bit more flair to the cabinets, beach grass was inserted into the semitransparent Lumicite doors when they were formed.
    In the end, the sweeping remodel took a surprisingly quick eight months to complete. “We had a great team,” says Schnier. “Because the Palleys knew what they wanted and had realistic expectations of the project, they were easy to work with, and we were able to get things done quickly and beautifully.”