Hidden Bay Area parcel allows architect to take risks

Lot-splitting legislation led Mahya Salehi Architects to project on flag-shaped space.

By Madeleine D’Angelo

Key takeaways

• A project in Fremont, California, by Mahya Salehi Architects demonstrates how the state’s lot-splitting regulations can support innovative single-family development in tight Bay Area markets.
• Design solutions have turned an ultra-narrow lot into a light-filled home with courtyards, staggered levels, skylights and varied ceiling heights.
• Cost pressures drove creative choices, such as hand-raked stucco.

At the beginning of 2023, a couple in tech approached architect Mahya Salehi about a funky bit of Bay Area land. It was long, skinny, sloped and shaped like a flag, with just the slimmest sliver of a pole actually facing the street.

“It’s peculiar in the sense that there’s no presence on the street,” Salehi said of the project in Fremont, California, dubbed “Washington Residence.” Even today, when the architect tells people she has a project there, they blink, wondering where it is.

That 0.29-acre parcel is one example of California’s lot-splitting bill. Inked into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021, the legislation allows some homeowners to divvy up their lots, paving the way for more homes in the state’s housing-strapped cities. But those lots don’t have to look like your stereotypical square or rectangle.

For a design team, the strange shape “ended up being a very interesting part of the work for us because it gave us some permissions to be more experimental, to think a little bit more outside of just the context of the street view,” said Salehi, the founder of Mahya Salehi Architects in Walnut Creek.

The lot also had a clear focal point: views of lush greenery at its far end, in front of a creek. On its other sides, it was bound by a five-story apartment building and a two-story residence with a 5-foot setback, and, toward the front, what would be the street side, another two-story house in a more Spanish-Mediterranean style.

“We need to find a way to bring in light and views within the lot and create interesting moments from our own property because we don’t have the luxury of facing out,” she added.

Setbacks and a utility easement further complicated the design, leaving the firm with very little to work with in terms of width and a maximum height of two stories. But sometimes the path of least resistance is the best path, so the firm adopted a linear plan, arranging the 4,800-square-foot interior around courtyards and windows to prevent it from becoming too much of a shotgun-style rowhouse. The firm also used the slope to their favor, carving out a below-grade lower level that benefited from skylights and double-height ceilings.

“We split the lower level and the upper floor, and we just staggered them,” she said. Effectively, the house is three stories, with one long main level, a half-basement scooched underneath, and a half-upper level tucked above.

“When you’re in the house, you feel like you’re in a three-story hall and you get a lot more footprint,” she said. “It became much more of an iterative process of seeing how much backyard you get based on how much you tuck in.”

Salehi founded her firm in 2020, and while her team had focused on major reconstructions and remodels, the Washington Residence was their first ground-up construction project on an empty lot. The novelty made it special, she said, and a recipient of “a lot of time and love.”

The Washington Residence project also came at an interesting time for the clients.

Like many homeowners, Salehi said their spatial needs evolved over the course of the pandemic. The architect saw clients focus on remote working spaces and multigenerational living arrangements, considering the decades-long investments in their residences that they might age into. It gave potential clients “this kind of longer-term view about going through a project,” she said.

The Washington Residence clients prioritized five en-suite bedrooms, along with a balance of public entertainment spaces (a formal dining room, a movie room) and private family spaces (a breakfast nook, a family room, offices, a gym). When it came to visual style, however, they were drawn to the ultra-modern aesthetics of multimillion-dollar glass-box homes in the Hollywood Hills. But when the clients visited friends in Arizona — friends with an enormous shiny home and echoingly tall ceilings — they didn’t like it so much in person, and their kids were so uncomfortable in the space that they could barely sleep there, the architect recalled.

Based on the different environments their clients experienced amid travels, Mahya Salehi Architects shaped the Washington Residence “into something that is still very homey and interesting,” Salehi said.

While the home still relies on modern lines and tall rooms, Salehi and her team carved out smaller spaces in the interior, such as a breakfast nook with 8-foot ceilings amid a more spacious kitchen. Even the formal great room, where the ceilings soar up to 16 feet, is vaulted so its edges have a cozier 9-foot ceiling height. It balances grandeur with ease, she said, creating moments where different scales afford different options.

“You can observe the larger party or whatever is happening, but you have these moments of refuge, peace and quiet,” Salehi said.

Cost was a major factor in the project, of course.

“Here it’s just a matter of like we’re lucky enough in the Bay Area that the value is there to do something so expensive,” she said. “Land is so valuable and whatever you build flies off the shelf.”

There are plenty of regions, she added, where putting in the piers and foundation systems needed for the Washington Residence’s sloped grading would make no financial sense, turning the project into less of an investment and more of a money pit.

Still, the design team did adjust as the Bay Area’s economy fluctuated and construction costs rose, Salehi said. The home’s exterior became an interesting case study in cost constraints, she pointed out: Initially specced in ridged Equitone fiber-cement panels and stone, the facade didn’t pencil out as material costs rose. Instead, Salehi and her team swapped Equitone for raked stucco, maintaining the vertical movement and textural softness at a much lower cost.

The stucco portions are “hand-raked, and I think that ended up being one of the most beautiful parts of the project because you really see the human touch,” Salehi said. “During different times of day, it either looks like completely white stucco, or you see very prominent shadow lines, [adding] another layer of interest.”