June Ou's home is enclosed by the Presidio of San Francisco on two sides, and when she first saw it, during a Sunday open house, that is how she felt - enclosed in the dark. If she hadn't made it up to the roof deck, gasping for air and light, she would have never come back.
"When I came up here, I was like, 'This is why you buy the house, for the view,' " says Ou, who paid $2.8 million for the bottom bookend of a row of six homes on a hillside tract along the Lyon Street Wall. Because the homes were developed as a piece, in 1923-24, Ou's side walls were the same as her neighbors, up against each other. But because hers is the northernmost property, Ou's down-slope neighbor is a shade tree in a national park.
"This property is really unique, bordered by the Presidio on two sides," she says.
For 85 years, a wall ran up three stories plus the penthouse, on the north facade. Twenty tiny rectangular windows didn't let in enough light, which took Ou two years of planning and construction to capture.
Now, coming up Lyon from Union Street, the building looks as if it had been sawed in half, the front and back of the old house pulled apart and a sheet of glass dropped in between. When lit at night, from the street it looks like a three-story atrium with a staircase suspended from the ceiling.
"The house now is kind of a barbell," says architect Gregory Iboshi. "There are living spaces on either side, but this middle section is for circulation and to face the view." Read More...
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