Rad to the Bone

Vine Projects’ thoughtful approach to renovation empowers a turreted Queen Anne Victorian in San Francisco

How do you update the past without destroying it? It’s a conundrum familiar to people who grew up in pedestrian-friendly cities and have brushed past familiar buildings undergoing a gut renovation. “I spent a lot of time thinking about the urban fabric,” says Vine Projects’ Rachel Vineberg Jones, who grew up in Brooklyn. That interest was honed while working at Gensler, where she focused on adaptive reuse. “Vine Projects’ goal is to deliver exceptional design that has an eye on both past and future,” she explains. “We value heritage, history and evoking the spirit of place.”

She demonstrated this ethos when she was asked by a young couple with school-age children to renovate a Queen Anne Victorian–era home in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood. “There were nice things—a newly added kitchen, a striking turret—and less appealing ones, like the recessed 1980s lighting,” Jones remembers. “They wanted to open up the interior, enhancing its flow, add more storage, add a bedroom and bathroom, an office and a wine cellar.”

Vine Projects’ work started with a foundation retrofit that brought the home up to seismic code; fortuitously it enhanced the basement level, creating space for that wine cellar and office. For clues on how to integrate the interior and exterior, Jones looked to the architecture. She swapped out the two staircases—“they had the same origin and destination points so they just felt like a relic”—in favor of a grand stairwell that brought light into the interior and accentuated the majesty of the home’s height, a trait confirmed by the long chandelier that threads through its center. “It created this wow moment,” Jones says. It also acts as a focal point, amplifying the relationship between the rooms.

The turret is another element that helped hone the flow. “It’s such a defining feature that we wanted to find a way to celebrate it,” says Jones, who engineered ways to echo the shape throughout the house. There’s the round platform bed that slips neatly into the circular space, the sitting room’s custom curved sofa and the motifs in that room’s art. There’s an emphasis on the dining room’s oval shape, underscored by a bespoke Calico wall mural and a chandelier from Allied Maker that seems poised to spin. Its historical use in castles ties it to the decor of the son’s room.

Open-concept spaces, like the sprawling family room, whose bifold door system embraces a garden perfected by Terremoto, are balanced by private, cozy dens, like that sitting room, and traditional areas, like that dining room, with its exquisitely reimagined molding, and the separate kitchen. “It’s not completely closed off,” says Jones. “But you have a little distance from the chaos of cooking.”

Sleek cabinetry, created in collaboration with Henrybuilt, eschews the uppers. The effect is
of a sleek, modern space perfectly seasoned with a sprinkling of tradition. That partnership with Henrybuilt is also responsible for the various permutations of storage—so essential to modern Amazon-infected life—like the primary bathroom’s polished vanity, the wardrobes hidden behind a hallway’s walls and the showstopping wine cellar with its dramatic arch.

Supporting these grand gestures are the small details that coax the home’s aging bones tenderly into the present, ensuring that they will remain strong for years to come: the carefully restored wood floors; the rehabilitated stained-glass window in the son’s room, the inspiration for the leaded glass that flanks the front door; the gooseneck profile of the stairway’s handrails, a nod to the home’s origins. “I really believe in living in a world where we value and fix things rather than replace them,” says Jones. A philosophy for buildings and for life.

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