The 801 Offices

Danville, California

2020

Varied textures and scales of wood create a new identity for this formerly bland, languishing office building.  This commercial refurbishment in Danville, a small Northern California town, transforms and expands the existing space with a bold volumetric statement that remains sensitive to the materials, history, and scale of the neighborhood.

As a study in the physical layers of the building envelope, the design strategy adds a new language, cloaking the banal existing building and instead aesthetically linking to Danville’s “San Francisco Stick” architectural heritage.  This late 19th-century style used simple wood strips and rectangular bay windows to decorate facades.  Although the style is easily recognized for its decorative qualities, it is best understood as a result of wood technology of the time.  The style used a widely available material in a simple decorative strategy that allowed variety, it reflects a certain vernacular developed during a time of rapid growth. With an interest in how this history can foster an aesthetic language, this design uses wood slats, cedar shingles, and protruding window volumes to evoke the architecture of Danville’s historic downtown. The result is a simple wood structure wrapped in a rich, multi-layered wrapper.   

For the structure, both the existing 8,000 sf building and the new 3,000 sf building have a two- story wood framed structure over a concrete slab on grade. The wood framing is a mix of conventional douglas fir joists and studs, Glulam beams, and “Red Built” open web trusses made of engineered wood and steel.  The first layer of the building skin is the original T-111 siding, itself a layer in the history lesson of wood technology.  The next layer is a cedar rain screen finished with a sustainable mineral sealant.  It wraps the existing and the new building volume.  At the ground level, painted cedar shingled rooms introduce another texture and scale, giving the base of the building a new heft while providing much needed storage.   The neighborhood’s dominant bay windows have been reinterpreted in a modern scale that responds to the increasingly suburban scale.

The completed project is home to a variety of medical and dental practices and is now a bustling healthcare hub for the community.