Sonoma

For a professional musician, we renovated a pre-engineered metal barn into a music room, mezzanine, exercise room, and bathrooms, breathing new life into a simple, utilitarian building. Located on a private vineyard within the hills above the Sonoma Valley, the site demanded a passive cooling strategy to create comfortable spaces during the hot summer months. We designed a living screen that covers part of the south and west elevations and roof to blanket the building with shade. To take advantage of the high sun angle in the summer months, we placed a single horizontal window on the south elevation, while the north elevation features a wall of glass that opens up the music room to the landscape and views. Two operable skylights create a natural chimney effect to evacuate warm air from the building while creating dramatic daylighting inside. Simple white walls and a white corrugated ceiling add to this effect of light airiness, reinforcing the composition of wenge veneer and exposed black framing. On the exterior, the green vines that stretch across the living screen ease the taut articulation of the building’s massing and fenestration.