Social Experiment

Butler Armsden reimagines a house on Stinton Beach, transforming it into a welcoming space with loads of entertaining space.

- Nancy A. Ruhling

And that can add up to a lot of people. There are four very active and sociable children in the family, and they like to invite scores of friends for sleepovers to their vacation home that's a 45-minute drive from San Francisco.

Set on a thin strip of land between a bay and a lagoon on Stinson Beach, the shingle-style house, which dates to the 1960s, needed a lot of tender loving care to make it a 21st-century amenity-packed retreat.

"It had good bones, but it hadn't been taken care of for a long time," says architect Glenda Flaim, a managing principal at San Franciscobased Butler Armsden Architects, which was commissioned to renovate the property.

The Butler Armsden team reshingled the exterior, added skylights, and redid the roof, the kitchen, and baths. The living room fireplace, the polished concrete floors, the structural wooden columns in the main living area and the wooden vaulted ceilings were retained.

"It was an exercise in doing more with less-the core of the house stayed to honor its history," Flaim says. "We used the process of subtraction to allow its soul to speak."

Because the footprint of the four-bed, three-bath, 2,600-square-foot house could not be expanded, "we had to reimagine how to make the best use of the space we had," Flaim says, adding that "it's a compact space, but it feels like every inch was used very well." Indoor and outdoor spaces, such as the paved front courtyard where the children.