a suburb of      a very soothing place      backyard      draws your eye      the front door      the kitchen      the living room      what these houses do really effectively      which is simple and it's kind of architectural   
Hi I'm Tia Shauf and i'm Stephen Shauf and you are in our home here in San
Rafael California welcome.

San Rafael is San Francisco. We moved here in large part because we have a five-year-old daughter and we were looking for a place to raise our family.
We first discovered this place. we'd been looking at a bunch of Eichlers and we
found this neat. You could see the basic bones of it; we knew we could do
something really great with it.
We, as designers , were able to kind of look and see if we just peeled all of the
stuff back, we could actually put it back together; we didn't find the need to really expand on it.

You walk in ; the paneling all the way through the house into the . It also marks the separation between what we generously call the private wing of the house and the public aspects of the house. The heart of this house is indeed .
It was actually a wall that separated the kitchen from , and we
decided to open that up and then we left a gap between the top of the kitchen
wall and the ceiling. The backsplash for the countertop in the kitchen is translucent and there's almost like a kind of a play (theater performance) that happens in that window. The perfect size for us for a small family. We weren't interested in having a really expansive interior.
I think is to bring the life of the house out into the yard and viceversa.

This is our design sense , you know, we like things really simple and clean just all
this glass around us in just really clean lines
it's just a great way to live and just being with open all the doors and kind
of move freely inside and outside.
I think that having the.. A HOUSE ,
its material , and its organizational expression , helps to provide a calming
counterbalance.
We both work full time and we have very busy lives
so it's ..it's just to be in and it's a nice easy way to feel
like come home from the chaos and just be ...you know, be home.