Translucence House is a lovely retreat located in San Francisco, California, redesigned in 2019 by Fougeron Architecture.

Description
This renovation and addition unravel a chapter of ill-considered renovations to create an urban retreat for a young family on a remarkable site. By re-using more than half of the original structure and improving the home’s environmental performance, the project also minimizes the 4000 SF home?s embodied carbon and ongoing carbon footprint.
The double-wide lot sits atop a bluff and next to a community garden, making for a rare condition in the heart of the city: a large, secluded site, overlooking the city and the bay. The site was filled and leveled in the early 1960s to accommodate the original house and pool, the scene of legendary parties. Renovations by a subsequent owner led to a messy collection of rooms out of sync with the flow of daily life The design brings clarity and openness to the home by taking an almost surgical approach, retaining essential structural elements while introducing new features. A series of interventions break apart the existing box, rewriting the relationships and connections between rooms. Glass and natural light both diffuse and hold together the composition, defining scenes throughout the house that explore perceptions of inside/outside, private/public, and light/dark as well as materiality.
The most visible intervention is the insertion of an all-glass pavilion enclosing...