Project Description
One Greenfield Court is a new home sited on the edge of a wooded bluff in a quiet neighborhood of the San Mateo hills. The site provides sweeping vistas of the San Francisco Bay, including a view of San Francisco to the north and the East Bay hills as they range south. Early program discussions established a mandate for site sensitivity and topographic integration, with a desire for the home to organically grow out of the terrain while being rooted in the descending hillside. As a result, the home appears diminutive and secluded from the street as it is blanketed by a rolling green roof that berms over most of the upper level. Hints of the views beyond can be glimpsed through the center of the home and around the green edges, but the magnitude of the visual drama beyond is mostly hidden from curbside. Passing through an entry court that is framed with inclining concrete arms, the downhill side of the home is revealed as a series of terraces that arc with the natural contours of the slope while providing light and outdoor access to the seemingly submerged rooms within. These curving exterior spaces are bound together by a number of steps and stairs that serve to link all outdoor areas, from a rooftop view terrace to a swimming pool that is semi-recessed into the hillside near the south property line.
The aesthetic for the home can loosely be described as ‘natural contemporary.’ Materials consist of clear finished red cedar siding, integral color cement plaster, and board-formed concrete. Arranged in three horizontal layers, these materials are a metaphor of the nature of the hillside: the concrete base represents the Franciscan chert bedrock, the cement plaster references the golden color of a California hillside in the summer, and the cedar siding is a nod to the sylvan setting that surrounds the site. Finally, copper and bronze accents provide a shimmering edge to the edifice and evoke the natural autumnal colors of fall.
On the inside, the primary spatial organizational principal of the home is not dependent on the horizontal stratification of the four-floor levels. Instead, the internal spaces are grouped into public and private zones, with the public domain being located on the east side while the private rooms are situated on the west. Internal access between these zones is restricted to one hidden door at each main level, and each zone is served by a separate stair: an ‘air stair’ for the public areas and an ‘earth stair’ for the private side of the house.
And while the home is outwardly ‘green’ thanks to the turf roof, the residence was also designed to be environmentally sensitive in a number of other ways. One Greenfield Court uses ground sourced heat pumps supported by eight 200’ deep wells to condition both the house and the pool. High levels of internal thermal mass help moderate exterior temperature extremes and semi-passive cooling strategies include a whole-house ventilation system to exhaust hot air from the interior via the ‘air stair’ core. Wood exterior siding systems incorporate rain screen technology and an array of PV cells is installed on the stair tower roof to offset electricity use during the daytime. And in anticipation of a dryer climate, the house incorporates a rainwater retention system with a dual underground cistern capacity of over 15,000 gallons. In recognition of these and other strategies, One Greenfield Court was certified as LEED Gold for homes upon completion in 2017.