San Francisco Clocktower Penthouse Is Keys To The City

This San Francisco Clocktower Penthouse lends you a staggering view of the SoMa neighborhood, and it’s on the market now for a wee $6 million.

100 years ago, the clock tower was part of Max Schmidt Lithography Printing Co., at the time the largest printer on the West Coast. In 1993, architect David Baker remade it into a loft space.

The couple who purchased the penthouse put it up for sale in 2016, with an asking price of $8.5 million. Not one bit. They lowered it to $6.25 million, but still the listing never found any interested buyer. Now, it returns, with 250,000 shaved off the asking price.

Potential owners get 3,000 square footage of space. And that’s just the indoors we’re talking about. They also are privy to 1,300 square footage of outdoor space courtesy of a wrap-around deck. Of the 127 lofts in the building, only the penthouse has access to the clocktower. The clock still functions to this day, with the building’s homeowners’ association taking care of upkeep.

The penthouse features original hardwood and concrete flooring, not to mention brick all throughout the space. On walls, you’ll find massive windows that let plenty of light in and provides spectacular views of the city. The third floor houses a game room, complete with a Dirty Harry pinball machine. Now that’s vintage.

In all, the penthouse has two bedrooms, the same number of bathrooms, and a glass-covered fireplace. The fourth and farthest floor is the clock tower room, where you can chill and see the inner gears of the timepiece.

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Photos courtesy of Compass and Open Home Photography

Anekona House For Volcano Lovers

If you like to be within the vicinity of volcanoes, this Hawaiian retreat sounds like heaven on Earth. Meet the Anekona House, a shape-shifting structure near the town of Waimea. It looks out over a wild stream and the rugged, panoramic beauty of Hawaii Island.

The owners of this house consists of a multi-generation family of artists and professional chefs. They wanted a home where they could chill outdoors but one that used only the rawest form of materials and minimal construction methodologies.

The resulting home relied on site-cast concrete, prefabricated steel, and local lava rock. The home features two contrasting linear sections bisecting a central corridor. The first half serves as the public area and looks like a row of pavilion-like living and entertaining spaces underneath a steel roof. The second half, meanwhile, offers up a splendid contrast. You’ll see here a series of heavy concrete bunkers that offers more privacy than the first half of the home.

As mentioned, bisecting the Anekona House is a lengthy corridor separating the bunkers and concrete interior walls. Elsewhere, you’ll find barn doors that wrap around the exterior walls and between each pavilion area, which means the family can open up the private spaces if they wanted to. These doors create a level of functionality that doesn’t interrupt the main purpose of the design in the first place. A clever architectural decision.

Power comes from a solar array on the roof, which makes the Anekona House completely self-contained. It also has natural cooling and uses all LED power, which makes it a fine choice for those who aim to live off-grid.

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Photos courtesy of Mauna Kea Realty

The Straume Weekend House Literally Came After The Storm

A storm brews. It lets out, causing havoc in its wake, leaving ruin after its trail. But from brokenness comes a chance to rebuild. Or make something even better. That’s exactly the origin story of the Straume Weekend House.

Here, you have a structure built after a storm washed away a deserted warehouse. The timber-clad home sits on a rocky outcropping on the coast of Norway’s Remøya. The new house shares the same footprint as the original. Built completely off-site, it boasts seven steel frames and looks like a futuristic but still quaint barnhouse.

When empty, the building takes on an almost monolithic aesthetic, with the wooden shutters covering the interior. These slide open when the space becomes occupied, unveiling glazed panels and inviting spectacular views of the nearby fjords inside. Indoors, you’ll find plenty of wood set in a mostly minimalist aesthetic. The austerity mixes will with the texture of the wood throughout the space, injecting a sense of homeliness in contrast with the stark plainness of the rest of the elements.

To make something beautiful out of a tragedy involves a great deal of imagination. And also a great deal of optimism. The storm that hit the old warehouse was tragic, but without it, the designers couldn’t have sewn beauty out of ruin. The best kind of architecture finds purpose, meaning, and wonder despite the circumstances. The Straume Weekend House stands as a refined example of that, gleaming as a beacon of hope after a terrible natural happenstance.

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Photos courtesy of Knut Hjeltnes

The Holmsland Dune House Reimagines What Contemporary Home Means

On the edge of the 7,000-kilometer coastline in Denmark, you’ll find a one-off contemporary house called the Holmsland Dune House. What’ll strike you immediately is its heavily cantilever structure, as if a giant cross levitating.

The design represents the owner’s rare condition. The client explained to architect Viktor Sørless that he has a form of mirror-touch synesthesia. Synesthesia, for the uninitiated, is a condition wherein a stimulus triggers a different response in a person. For example, the musician Lorde has a form of synesthesia enabling her to “see” sounds as colors. Only 2 percent of the population carry this condition.

The client’s kind of synesthesia allows him to literally feel what others are feeling. For instance, they feel as if their own body is being touched whenever they see someone being touched.

In the case of the Holmsland Dune House, the client feels the sensation of the wind in the dunes, giving him a calming experience. Which explains the curtains and ceiling windows in every window, meant to accentuate the movement of the wind.

Currently under construction in the small town of Hvide Sande, the Holmsland Dune House, once finished, will sit in the artificial canal connecting Ringkøbing Fjord to the North Sea, in the western part of Central Denmark Region.

The dwelling’s remote location gives unobstructed views of the nearby panorama. As a result, it gives the client front-row seats to the beautiful landscape enveloping his cantilever house. He enters the house via an elevator room, which also serves as a vestibule and gallery.

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Photos courtesy of Studio Viktor Sørless