This San Francisco Architect Has Some Thoughts On the City’s Many Vacant Spaces

Anand Sheth’s presentation at the San Francisco Art Fair shows how designers are thinking about adaptability and reuse.

This story is part of Fair Take, our reporting on global design events that looks up close at the newest ideas in fixtures, furnishings, and more.

For the second year in a row, Dwell has partnered with architect and curator Anand Sheth on an exhibition at the San Francisco Art Fair, held at Fort Mason. Called "Inheriting San Francisco," the show celebrates San Francisco’s historic adaptability and explores what Sheth calls the city’s "aesthetics of vacancy" and the values shaping its urban landscape today. "It speaks to a kind of resourcefulness and innovation that feels very true to the Bay Area," adds the fair’s director, Kelly Freeman. "The constant push to create more with what’s in front of you, and to keep stretching what’s possible. "It feels incredibly of the moment."

Sheth, who’s called San Francisco home for 20 years, filled the stage of a theater with furniture, lighting, and other objects by emerging designers that represent the ideas, preoccupations, and obsessions animating the Bay Area’s creative community right now. Ahead of the show, which is now on view and runs through April 19, we spoke with Sheth about his curatorial approach, the ideas driving San Francisco design, and some of his own custom work he created for the fair.

Untildef Studio, Lam Arm Chair, Nomad Chair, and Off Cut Side Table

Photo courtesy Anand Sheth

What does the theme "Inheriting San Francisco" mean to you?

"Inheriting San Francisco" is a response to supporting my emerging creative community in taking responsibility as stewards of the city. We’re at a certain place in our careers where we’re not just accepting information and getting inspired by San Francisco; we’re building our businesses and shaping institutions. With that comes this potential burden of inheriting all of the good and also the challenges that San Francisco presents.

What does it mean for you to act as both architect and curator in this context?

A real through line of my curatorial practice has been less about finding beauty in the world, though that’s important, and more about unearthing a more experimental version of beauty. In an art environment that prioritizes beauty, how do we allow people to make space in their palette for confrontational concepts and ideas? And how can those concepts align with beauty while being just as valuable as the beauty itself?

I’m trying to relate my curatorial practice to the process of architecture, where we’re promising to complete something that doesn’t exist yet, but we’re committed to its realization nonetheless. For the San Francisco Art Fair, we don’t exactly know the final look and feel of the objects we’ll be presenting, but we do know a lot about the narrative they’re communicating.

Untildef Studio, Nomad Loveseat

Photo courtesy Anand Sheth

The background, surrounding, and threshold of the stage, as well as the capsule furniture collection on stage, are made from ordinary Oriented Strand Board (OSB). What drew you to elevate that material?

OSB is an extremely ubiquitous and cheap material. When you sand it down to a certain level, it has an interesting grain pattern that feels really fluid. Last year, I was invited by a friend to be the architect and curator of a pop-up concept, and I selected OSB as the guiding material. We played into the DIY aesthetic a little bit because OSB is an inexpensive and solid material that’s often used to board up storefronts. Vacancy is not an accident; it’s programmed into the structure of our economy. I wanted to express the creative community’s discontent about not having enough space, while there’s all sorts of vacant space across the San Francisco. In this concept of inheriting San Francisco, it’s about the relationship of this material in our pedestrian experience.

Untildef Studio, Offcut Side Table A

Photo courtesy Anand Sheth

See the full story on Dwell.com: This San Francisco Architect Has Some Thoughts On the City’s Many Vacant Spaces

An I.M. Pei House in Texas Lists for $22M—and Everything Else You Need to Know About This Week

Obama’s Oval Office is recreated down to a fruit bowl, Ikea debuts a meatball-flavored lollipop, and more.

• The largest of just three homes designed by I.M. Pei has hit the market in Fort Worth, Texas, for $22 million. Designed in 1969 for an oil-and-banking heiress and her fourth husband, who loved to entertain, the sprawling 19,000-square-foot home backs up its price tag with three kitchens, seven bedrooms, and two wine cellars. (The Wall Street Journal)
• A hyper-exact replica of Michael S. Smith’s design for Barack Obama’s Oval Office is nearly finished at the $850 million Obama Presidential Center. The near one-to-one remake includes sanctioned reproductions of two Edward Hopper paintings, pottery by the Native American artists whose work was on display in the original office, and a bowl of plastic apples. Here’s what else it holds. (Chicago Sun-Times)

What started as an April Fools’ prank is now real life: Ikea and Chupa Chups release a limited-edition lollipop inspired by Swedish meatballs and lingonberry spread.

Photo courtesy Ikea

• Known for Owning Manhattan and Million Dollar Listing New York, Ryan Serhant is heading west with the California debut of his eponymous brokerage. Already boasting $2 billion in inventory, standout listings include a $195 million Beverly Hills mansion with room for 10,000 bottles of wine and a 24-car garage. (The New York Post)

• After losing his home in the 2025 Palisades Fire, Billy Crystal is returning to Broadway this fall with 860, a one-man show he wrote and named for the burned-down address where he lived for 46 years. (Variety)

• For April Fools’, Ikea said it was launching a vegan, meatball-flavored lollipop. Now it’s no longer a joke: The furniture retail giant is partnering with Chupa Chups for a real launch, and says it is giving away one million lollipops to in-store customers this June. (People)

Top photo courtesy JA2

For $4M, You Can Buy a Three-Building Hilltop Compound in L.A.

Designer Kathryn McCullough and musician Andrew Bulbrook revamped the Mount Washington property, which includes a 1940s farmhouse, a midcentury home, and a two-level ADU.

Location: 850 Rome Drive, Los Angeles, California

Price: $3,999,000

Year Built: 1941 and 1958

Renovation Date: 2025

Renovation Designers and Architect: Andrew Bulbrook, Kathryn McCullough, and Linda Taalman

Landscape Designer: Terremoto

Footprint: 3,479 square feet (4 bedrooms, 7 baths)

Lot Size: 0.37 Acres

From the Agent: "Perched on a rare flat ridge at the very top of Los Angeles’s Mount Washington neighborhood, this newly completed creative compound reimagines a historic hillside property into a series of interconnected living and working spaces. The site originally held two homes: a 1940s barn-style farmhouse and a 1960s midcentury-modern residence, which were fully rebuilt and expanded into a compound with four bedrooms, four kitchens, seven bathrooms, a pool, and a new ADU tower. A kitchen addition was made to the midcentury-modern home, a JADU was added to the original farmhouse, and the new ADU was constructed from the ground up."

Designer Kathryn McCullough and musician Andrew Bulbrook renovated the property over the course of five years.

Photo by Gavin Cater

Photo by Gavin Cater

The agent notes that the furnishings were "chosen to complement the architecture while keeping the spaces comfortable and inviting."

Photo by Gavin Cater

See the full story on Dwell.com: For $4M, You Can Buy a Three-Building Hilltop Compound in L.A.
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Before & After: Just Wait for the "Juicy" Pool Tile Covering a Bathroom in This Brooklyn Brownstone

Add it to the list of playful moves by O-N Architects in the renovated family home, which includes a mural by a tattoo artist and an aluminum bar with a party trick.

Irene Chung and Davis Owen, cofounders of O-N Architects, don’t mind if you call their work a little strange. "We like to create spaces that feel five degrees off of what you expect," says Owen. "Things that require you to take a second look."

Consider this recently completed brownstone renovation in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood, in Brooklyn. Its owners, a couple with young children, asked for room-specific solutions to a few problems they were having. On the main floor, a fireplace in the dining room was defunct, while one in the living room had a faux-classical facade that wasn’t welcoming anyone for a fireside chat. Downstairs, they needed a guest suite for visiting relatives, while upstairs, both bathrooms felt cramped.

Chung and Owen, in collaboration with architect Francis Aguillard, who consulted on the design, started the renovation with research. One of their clients is German and the other is a born-and-raised New Yorker, so first they went macro, looking at "the history of design and building culture in both countries" around the time of the brownstone’s 1910s construction, says Owen. This had them delving into the Bauhaus movement as well as the speculative development of brownstones, which were built in repetition with a high level of craftsmanship, and thinking about ways to marry the two.

Before: Entry

Before: O-N Architects personalized a three-level, 2,500-square-foot, 1910s brownstone in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn for a family with eclectic tastes.

Courtesy of O-N Architects

After: Entry

The designers commissioned painter and tattoo artist Evan Paul English for a custom mural featuring a floral and animal motif, where bunnies peak around corners and birds perch atop the mirror frame.

Photo: Nicholas Venezia

The mural was inspired by an heirloom cabinet belonging to the husband of the family, who’s German. "It has a flower detail on it that we wanted to reinterpret in an American aesthetic," says Chung.

Photo: Nicholas Venezia

See the full story on Dwell.com: Before & After: Just Wait for the "Juicy" Pool Tile Covering a Bathroom in This Brooklyn Brownstone
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After a Total Overhaul, This $250K Airstream Is Ready to Hit the Road

The 1975 Overlander camper has been revitalized with a snow-white interior, custom cabinetry, and zellige tile.

Current Location: Bend, Oregon

Price: $250,000

Year Built: 1975

Renovation Designer: Mountain Modern Airstream

Footprint: 170 square feet

From the Designer: "Designed for long weekends and week-long escapes, this 27-foot 1975 Overlander is a rolling R & D lab packed with clever, high-tech features. We added an invisible cooktop to maximize counter space, a convertible coffee table that rises into a dining table, and a floating bed platform for an open and minimal feel. The hidden toilet tucks neatly beneath the sink, out of sight until you need it, and the wall-mounted bathroom faucet saves even more space. A limewash shower offers a low-maintenance, minimalist finish. ​The kitchen features push-to-open cabinetry throughout and custom drawer dividers to keep tools and essentials organized in transit. Tech-wise, we equipped it with a Garmin RV system, built-in speakers, and smart storage throughout—this Airstream is fully road-trip ready and showroom worthy."

This 1975 Overlander camper has been revitalized with a snow-white interior, custom cabinetry, and zellige tile.

Photo by Anna Jacobs Photography

Photo by Anna Jacobs Photography

The renovation added a custom coffee table that transform into a dining table. 

Photo by Anna Jacobs Photography

See the full story on Dwell.com: After a Total Overhaul, This $250K Airstream Is Ready to Hit the Road
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From the Archive: For $145K, Architect William Massie Built a Curvy Concrete Home From the Ground Up

His clients figured a prefabricated log cabin was all they could afford. Massie built something with more personality for less cash.

Welcome to From the Archive, a look back at stories from Dwell’s past. This story previously appeared in the August 2002 issue.

Keith and Sylvia Owens are a suburban London couple who like to indulge in travel and architecture, albeit in a modest fashion. Seven years ago, they found their way to Montana. The clarity of the sky and horizons that stretch for miles so inspired them that when, a year later, Sylvia read an English magazine, Build-It, advertising 2o-acre plots near White Sulphur Springs, they decided to investigate. After arriving in this tiny town in 1997, they bought the smallest available parcel of Grassy Mountain Ranch. "It was the price of a new car," remembers Keith, an art teacher. They planned to erect a cheap, prefabricated log cabin, sit back, and enjoy the spectacular views. Keith would finally have the time to read more about one of his heroes, Le Corbusier.

Then they met William Massie, a 38-year-old architect who designed solely on the computer and planned to build his concept houses in cheap materials like concrete. At that point, back in 1999, he had never built a home, but he promised the Owens that his experiment would be cheaper than anything they could truck in. Even that log cabin. The cautious-inclined couple took another chance.

Two years later, their 2,000-square-foot summer home is a gleaming four-story tower with shimmering, white elliptical sides. The glass facades front and back make the interior so open to the wild Montana landscape that, according to Sylvia, "we feel like we’re living in it." For the Owens, the house fulfills a lifelong ambition to live in an architecturally daring home. What’s more, they could afford it: The price tag was just $145,000.

The house was a turning point for Massie, too. Since he left the large Manhattan firms James Stewart Polshek and Robertson and McAnulty seven years ago to go out on his own—he supported himself by teaching in the department of architecture at Montana State University in Bozeman—he’s been determined to return modernism to its low-cost heritage. In the mid-2oth century, modernist architects designed their houses to be mass-produced objects like the Model T. "Modernism," argues the architect, "has become this bourgeois condition that costs a huge amount of money, and is rarely constructed in the same materials or vocabulary or political arena as the rest of the country."

With the Owens house, and another inexpensive home for the New York photographer Vicky Sambunaris, Massie is reversing that course, revolutionizing construction technology while at the same time expanding his design horizons.

It starts on the computer. In Massie’s hands, the PC is not a toy on which to concoct something elaborate and hard to build. He has little patience for the deconstructivist antics of a Frank Gehry. "I’m interested in the computer’s ability to simplify, not complicate, the building process," he says.

Massie draws with an $800 nerve-surface modeling program called Rhinoceros. "You take control points in three-dimensional space and push and pull them so you’re sculpting the object," explains Massie. He’s so used to designing this way that he admits to "feeling things in the computer almost with my hands." Every part of the Owens’ house was realized on his Dell PC.

But unlike many other architects who design solely on the computer, Massie moves directly from these models into construction, avoiding costly working drawings that have to be explained to a contractor. He builds the houses himself, operating out of a 200-square-foot garage in a Bozeman industrial park. The office is large enough to fit a bank of computers and four architecture students as adept at programming as they are at pouring concrete.

Massie’s designs all feature low-cost materials, such as plywood and concrete, that can be bought at Home Depot. He’s especially fond of concrete because it’s highly malleable. "It allows me to experiment, and when it’s poured into a beautiful form, there’s nothing more beautiful in the world," he asserts. (He never misses the annual World of Concrete Convention in Las Vegas.)

To realize his forms, Massie relies on a $60,000 computer numerically controlled (CNC) machine. Taking its orders from the PC that stores Massie’s designs, this milling device can carve out a foam or wood mold for a piece of curving roof or a shower basin. "I can machine out a kitchen sink easily," says Massie, standing by the ungainly apparatus as its arm slides back and forth, cutting lines into a four-by-eight-foot block of Styrofoam that exactly match the computer model. "It comes out in negative, like an ice cube tray." The foam mold is then taken to the site, where concrete is poured into it. Once hardened, the piece is ready to be placed in the house.

For larger elements like the 40-foot-long curving wall of the Sambunaris house or the roof of Massie’s own home, he makes the molds in sections, and then glues the resultant concrete pieces together. The curving concrete forms are strong, and can carry more stress than their flat counterparts. On his own house—which is barely a mile from the Owens’ place—he wasn’t satisfied with the engineering analysis for the curved concrete roof sections. "I had to know how strong they were, so I loaded up my pickup and drove over them," he says.

Constructing housing parts in this fashion is inexpensive. The necessary Styrofoam and concrete cost about $40 per mold. Sometimes that’s not cheap enough for Massie. The high, curving exterior walls on the Owens house, for example, are made up of 700 panels, each of which had to be cast in concrete using a standard polystyrene foam mold. The price on these store-bought molds was right—$25—but they produced a flat surface. So with his CNC machine, Massie carved out large custom plywood clamps, which, when clipped to the standard foam molds, bent them into the desired curve. Concrete was then poured in. The walls took three weeks to erect and cost $40,000. The total construction budget was $110,000.

These materials have another, less obvious advantage: flexibility. Take, for instance, the siting of the Owens house. When you drive toward it, the house appears to be standing plumb in the middle of a five-mile stretch of straight highway. Just before you reach it, the road drops away and there’s the house high on the hill above you. To accomplish this visual sleight of hand, before filling the formwork with concrete, Massie’s crew shifted the plywood-and-foam mold around the site until they got the sight lines exactly right.

For all their ingenuity, Massie’s drawing and construction technologies don’t just appeal to a client’s bank account. They also unleash new design possibilities. Massie has always been fascinated by sinuous forms, but as a dedicated modernist he could never find a reason to use them—until Montana’s rolling hills came to the rescue. "Suddenly, I needed curves if my buildings were to have a relationship with this landscape."

Even though the Owens tower is a nod to the grain elevator—it too has Galvalume siding—it is the house’s curvature that pulls it into the hillside. More significantly, it distinguishes the house from the oversized (and overpriced—one of similar size sold recently for $265,000) log cabin residences that dominate other parts of Grassy Mountain. Massie, the low-cost crusader, is thrilled. Says the architect, "If I can produce a house that is standard in terms of its expense but extraordinary in terms of its idea, I know I’m winning."

See more from the Dwell archive on US Modernist.

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From the Archive: The Iconoclastic Rise of Charles Haertling

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Two Boxes—One Emerald Green, One Wood—Transform an 861-Square-Foot Bucharest Apartment

The entry is a jewel-toned portal with a curtain that can reshape the living area; the wood box creates a hall to the bedroom.

Houses We Love: Every day we feature a remarkable space submitted by our community of architects, designers, builders, and homeowners. Have one to share? Post it here.

Project Details:

Location: Bucharest, Romania

Architects: DORON Atelier / @doronatelier

Architect:  OMAMBO / @omambogallery

Footprint: 861 square feet

Builder: Publimpress

Photographer: Clement Vayssieres / @clement.vayssieres

Photographer: Kelvin Silva

From the Architect: "Rather Two, an intimate 861-square-foot apartment in Bucharest, is a home shaped as much by emotion and memory as by design. Realized by architects Anca and Kelvin, the project emerges from a reflection on two distinct yet equally influential cultures: Anca’s Romanian heritage, rooted in symbolism and lush landscapes, and Kelvin’s Angolan origins, shaped by rituals and earthy terrains. These cultural narratives became the guiding path for the apartment’s color palette, materiality, and spatial choreography.

"The design enhances the apartment’s existing architecture with varying ceiling heights of up to almost 10 feet, defined room division, and a 26-foot-deep living space.  Through deliberate contrasts of compression and decompression, the home unfolds as a series of complementary atmospheres that engage the senses and expand the lived dimension of the space. This approach manifests in the project’s signature "two-box" concept: a green box and a wood box. The green box creates a strongly introverted moment upon entering the home, before revealing a living area that connects to the surrounding cityscape, filtered through the crown of a historic tree. The wood box preludes the arrival to the sleeping area, transporting the visitor to a calm and balanced environment. In contrast to the apartment’s given sharp geometry, the furnishing chosen purposefully explores soft rounded edges in order to wave in much needed fluidity and freedom of movement. This gesture is echoed in every detail of the design.

"Custom furniture pieces, realized with local carpenters, respond to the apartment’s complex geometry while maintaining a coherent design language. In order to maximize functionality in a small home, the living room was redimensioned. A new space is created behind a double-faced acoustic curtain. A single unit transforms seamlessly between bedroom, office, and dressing room, defining a new multifunctional room.

"Rather Two is intentionally unconstrained by stylistic definitions. Instead, it explores confrontation and dialogue between heritage and new trends, ornament and minimalism, softness and roughness. Each material is selected for its sensorial impact: warm wood, rough stucco, cold stone, and soft textiles invite touch as much as sight. Sustainability plays a pivotal role, from natural raw materials to innovative applications of recycled PET boards in collaboration with Smile Plastics, adding unexpected textures, translucency, and color."

Photo by Clement Vayssieres

Photo by Clement Vayssieres

Photo by Kelvin Silva

See the full story on Dwell.com: Two Boxes—One Emerald Green, One Wood—Transform an 861-Square-Foot Bucharest Apartment