Quiet Minimal 
From the street, the Cow Hollow house reads like it has always been there. Weathered cedar shingles, black-trimmed windows, a garage tucked below grade behind cor-ten steel planters — it is a composed, slightly brooding presence on a block where the Bay Area’s architectural history is written in wood and steep lots. What the street view does not prepare you for is what happens once you step through that arched front door.
The Project
Cow Hollow is a renovation of a historic shingle-style residence in the Cow Hollow neighborhood of San Francisco. The project took the existing structure seriously — preserving its cedar shingle skin, its arched doorways, its ornate entry surround — while completely reimagining the interior organization around a new light-bringing strategy. The central move was the introduction of a full-width glass and black steel roof structure over the main living and dining volume, effectively converting what would have been a dark middle section of the house into the brightest room in the building. The design holds two realities at once: the craft and texture of early twentieth-century shingle architecture on the outside, and a precise, industrially detailed interior addition on the inside.
The Spaces
The Garden Courtyard and Entry Approach
The garden side of the house is where the project’s quieter confidence shows most clearly. A timber deck pathway leads to the arched front entry, bordered by ferns, flowering ground cover, and young trees that have already started to soften the facade. The arched door, painted a deep matte black with ornate bracketed surround detail, sits open in several of the exterior photographs — and through it you can already see the white interior and a flash of red seating, a hint that the inside will be warmer and more playful than the exterior lets on.
The Shingle Facade Up Close
Seen from the side garden, the cedar shingles read almost like a living surface — their color shifting from honey gold in fresh sections to a deeper warm brown where age and shade have worked on them. The black-framed arched windows with their grid glazing bars appear here at close range, lush deciduous branches pressing in from the right, ferns banking the base of the wall. Through the glass you can make out the dining space inside: red-orange chairs, a white interior volume, a glimpse of the glass roof above. The contrast between the organic layered exterior and the crisp white room beyond it is the project’s central visual argument.
The Rear Elevation and Annex Volume
Photographed from the garden, the rear of the house reveals the full massing strategy. The original two-story shingle volume connects to a slightly lower addition, both clad in matching cedar shingles so the join reads as deliberate rather than apologetic. Black-framed French doors at ground level open the addition directly onto the lawn. A row of black-trimmed clerestory windows lines the roofline of the addition — these feed daylight into the glass roof structure below. Young trees planted close to the building will eventually give the whole composition a more embedded, grown-into quality.
The Courtyard Entry, Daytime
In a second exterior photograph taken from a slightly wider angle on the courtyard side, the full entry sequence becomes clear. The ornate black arch frames the number 1629 in simple metal numerals. The arched grid window to the right of the door shows the dining room chairs inside, now in full afternoon light. A young magnolia or similar broadleaf tree provides scale — its trunk is already chest-high, its canopy beginning to extend over the timber path. The black decorative brackets that articulate the roofline above the upper windows are visible here, tying the exterior millwork language together.
The Glass Roof Dining Room, Looking Toward the Kitchen
Inside, the central dining volume is defined almost entirely by what is above it. A black steel truss and glazing system spans the full width of the room, filling it with a quality of light that is closer to a greenhouse or an atelier than a conventional dining room. The dining table is a long dark-stained wood slab, surrounded by coral-red armchairs — the one piece of warm color in an otherwise neutral palette of white walls, dark hardwood floors, and black steel. Looking toward the far end, an arched opening in natural oak trim connects to the kitchen beyond, and the glass stair with black steel stringers is visible at the right edge of the frame.
The Glass Roof Volume, Overhead View
From an upper level, looking down and across the glass roof, the spatial logic of the addition becomes fully legible. The roof is a grid of black steel members and clear glazing, casting a lattice of shadow lines across the white walls below. The upper level — accessed by the black steel and glass stair — is wrapped in a glass balustrade, keeping sightlines open across the double-height void. On the wall facing the upper landing, a small colorful painting hangs in a position that catches both natural and artificial light. Below, the dining table and coral chairs anchor the ground floor, and the arched oak-framed doors that open to the garden line the far wall.
The Double-Height Interior, Stair and Living Zone
From inside the dining room looking toward the stair and the living area beyond, the project’s layering of periods and materials is most visible. The black steel floating stair with glass balustrade reads as fully contemporary. Alongside it, the arched oak-trimmed windows and doors are clearly drawn from the original building’s language but now sit flush with white plaster walls rather than period millwork. In the living zone behind the dining table, midcentury-adjacent chairs in natural and dark tones sit around a low credenza, and full-height glazed French doors open the space to the garden — the cedar shingles visible just outside.
The Glass Roof Volume, Second Upper Angle
A third interior photograph taken from the upper landing captures the full diagonal sweep of the glass roof from a higher vantage point. The shadow grid from the steel mullions falls dramatically across the curved upper wall. The glass balustrade rail continues across the landing, with small art pieces on the wall at this level. Below, the dining table receives direct sunlight through the clear glazing — the contrast between the sun-drenched table surface and the shadows cast by the steel structure is the kind of detail that changes by the hour as the sun moves.
The Kitchen
The kitchen is positioned just beyond the dining room, separated by the arched oak-trimmed opening. It is a composed, purposeful room: flat-front white upper cabinets with frosted glass inserts sit above a bamboo-faced island with a stainless steel countertop. A single casement window in natural oak framing looks out to the garden above the sink. Three black dome pendant lights hang at varying heights over the island, and a pair of white wire-frame stools tuck under the counter edge. A stainless steel refrigerator column finishes the run. An orange ceramic bowl on the island is the only warm accent color in the kitchen itself — the coral chairs are visible just out of frame.
What you might carry home
The most transferable idea from Cow Hollow is the glass roof itself — not literally, for most people, but as a way of thinking about where light is actually missing in your home. The designers here identified that the center of the plan was dark and gave it the most radical intervention available. Before you buy another floor lamp, it is worth mapping where your house receives no direct daylight and asking whether that is a furniture problem or a structure problem. A tubular skylight or even a single roof window in a hallway can do proportionally what the glass roof does here at scale.
The second thing worth borrowing is the discipline of keeping one material consistent across the exterior even when the building grows. The addition at Cow Hollow uses the same cedar shingles as the original house, and the result is a compound that reads as a whole rather than a main house with an afterthought attached. If you are adding a mudroom, a sunroom, or a studio in your backyard, matching the dominant exterior cladding — even if the window style differs — goes a long way toward making the new piece feel considered.
Third: the coral chairs. In a room where the structure, the walls, the floors, and most of the furniture are dark, white, or black, one repeated accent color in a lively but not aggressive hue does a lot of work. Cow Hollow does not scatter warmth around randomly — it concentrates it in one repeated object type, the dining chair, and lets everything else stay neutral. That is a replicable strategy in any room where you want personality without noise.
Finally, the way the arched oak window trim is used inside as a framing device — not on the exterior, but on interior-facing walls — is a small detail with real effect. Rather than letting the arched openings disappear into the white walls, the natural oak surround gives each arch a presence, almost like framed apertures within the room. If you have interior openings or pass-throughs, adding a simple wood surround in a contrasting tone to the wall color is a low-cost way to give them the weight they deserve.
Cow Hollow is a reminder that the best renovations do not have to choose between respecting what a building already is and doing something genuinely new inside it. The cedar shingles stay. The arched entry stays. And then, in the middle of it all, there is a room full of sky.
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Cedar shingles hide a glass-roof inside
