SERVICES

Restaurants, clinics, offices, retail, and light industrial spaces require an architect who understands not only the design challenges, but also the operational constraints that come with building inside an existing structure for a specific tenant. Lease terms, base-building conditions, demising walls, MEP capacity, accessibility triggers, and the landlord's approval process all bear on what is possible. studio c handles commercial tenant improvements in the $150,000 to $5,000,000 construction range across the San Francisco Bay Area. We work directly with business owners and tenants, coordinate with landlords and building management when required, and stay through construction so that the build matches the design and the lease terms. Past commercial work includes restaurant fit-outs, medical clinics, professional office suites, retail spaces, and light industrial buildouts. Each project starts with feasibility: existing conditions, accessibility compliance, code triggers, and the landlord's standards. The design contract is built from what feasibility finds, not from what was assumed.

Passive House is the most rigorous building-performance framework currently in practice. A certified passive house uses roughly ten percent of the heating and cooling energy of a code-compliant building of the same size and program. The performance is achieved through envelope design, mechanical strategy, and energy modeling, not through bolt-on technology. studio c carries dual passive house credentials: Certified Passive House Consultant (CPHC) from PHIUS, and Certified Passive House Designer (CPHD) from the Passive House Institute in Darmstadt, the original European body. Holding both is unusual and reflects how seriously we take this work. We design new passive house construction and execute passive house retrofits across the San Francisco Bay Area. New construction projects pursue certification under PHIUS or PHI protocols depending on the owner's priorities and the climate-zone considerations. Retrofit projects address the existing envelope, the existing mechanical strategy, and the operating realities of the building's current use, in the order that produces the most performance per dollar. Passive House design starts with envelope and mechanical decisions in schematic and resolves them in design development. Projects where these decisions are deferred to CD or construction will not certify. We make the decisions when they are still actionable.

California's ADU regulations have made adding a second unit to a single-family lot more feasible than it has been in a generation. SB-9, the California HOME Act, expanded that further. SB-9 gives single-family lot owners two distinct rights: build up to two primary units on the existing lot without splitting it, or split the lot into two roughly equal parcels and develop each. Combine the two rights and a single original parcel can carry up to four primary units. The interaction between SB-9 and ADU law is where most of the complexity lives. On lot-split parcels, each new lot can generally host either a primary home with an ADU or a duplex with no ADU, and the choice carries downstream consequences for design, financing, and resale. studio c handles ADU and SB-9 projects across the Bay Area, from straightforward conversions of existing accessory structures to detached ADUs with new footprints to ADUs over garages with vertical additions. Recent work includes a two-scenario feasibility for an ADU in El Cerrito, where transit proximity to BART, lot slope, and the structural capacity of an existing 1950s garage drove the analysis. Each project starts with diagnostic work because the pathway determines everything else. Detached ADU rules differ from conversion ADU rules. Transit-adjacent height tiers vary by jurisdiction. SB-9 carries its own constraints: the property must sit in a single-family residential zone, parcels resulting from a lot split must be at least 1,200 square feet and roughly equal in size (no more than 60/40), the owner signs a three-year owner-occupancy affidavit for any lot-split path, and various site-level exclusions apply (high fire hazard severity zones, established historic districts with the AB 1061 carve-out for non-altering development, designated wetlands, certain other categories). Each applicant may use the lot-split provision only once. studio c handles SB-9 projects where the analysis suggests the strategy is genuinely viable for the property and the owner's goals. Not every single-family lot in California is a candidate, and the feasibility study resolves which path is actually available before the design contract is written.

Industrialized construction takes work that historically happened on the job site and moves it to a controlled factory environment. Prefabrication takes assemblies that historically were built piece by piece on site and delivers them as completed modules. Done well, both approaches reduce construction schedule, improve quality control, lower waste, and produce a building that performs more predictably than a comparable site-built equivalent. Done poorly, they amount to expensive boxes shipped to expensive sites that still need expensive site work. The difference is in the upfront planning. studio c has seven years of direct experience inside the industrialized-construction supply chain, including roles at Acre Designs (net-zero prefab homes) and Project Frog (Design for Manufacturing and Assembly for institutional and commercial buildings). What we bring to a developer or owner considering prefabrication is the planning work that determines whether prefab is appropriate for the project, what the kit-of-parts strategy should be, how the project sequences against the factory's production calendar, and how the site-built work integrates with the factory-built components. This service is most useful to small developers building multiple similar units, to institutional owners building repeated typologies, and to homeowners pursuing passive house or net-zero performance where factory-built envelope precision is meaningful.

A custom home is a long commitment for both the owner and the architect. Most owners build one in their lifetime. The decisions made during design will be lived with for twenty or thirty years. studio c designs custom homes across the San Francisco Bay Area, primarily for owners who treat the home as a long-term investment rather than a near-term resale. The work is driven by program first (how the owner actually lives), envelope and energy performance second (how the building works), and aesthetic decisions third (how the building feels and looks). That sequence is not an artistic preference. It is what produces a home that holds up. Past custom residential work includes new single-family construction, deep retrofits of existing homes, additions that engage the existing structure honestly rather than disguising it, and projects where envelope performance was the driving constraint. Whether the project is conventional construction or passive house, the diagnostic phases come first: feasibility, site visit, code and zoning review, and the structured decisions about what the home actually needs to do. We stay through construction. The drawings get you the permit. Construction administration is what gets you the home.

Not every architectural service is a full design contract. Sometimes an owner, a small developer, or another design professional needs a focused study on a specific question. Will this alteration trigger ADA accessibility upgrades to the path of travel? Does this proposed change of use require a conditional use permit in this zoning district? What does the wildfire-defense requirement actually demand for this property in the Wildland-Urban Interface? studio c handles focused consulting engagements that produce a written deliverable answering a specific question. The work is scoped to the question, fees are set against the time required, and the deliverable is sized to be useful on its own. Typical consulting topics include accessibility ( alterations, path of travel triggers, CASp-style walkthroughs), code interpretation (compliance questions, occupancy and use classifications, fire-resistive construction), permit strategy for non-standard projects, wildfire defense planning for WUI properties, and pre-purchase due-diligence reviews for owners considering a property they intend to alter. These engagements are useful for owners who are not ready for a full design contract but who need professional answers to specific questions before they make a decision.