Palo Alto Craftsman IV

On a relatively small corner lot of 5,625 s.f in Palo Alto’s desirable Midtown neighborhood, we are proposing a 2,200 s.f. 5BR/4.5BA house with one car attached garage and no basement (due to the site being in a flood zone).

The design features a Craftsman exterior with generous front and rear porches, a formal living room, open great room, and airy central stairway adjacent to the foyer. Given the amount of program the owners requested for a two story house of this size, we had to use our entire bag of tricks to get the floor plan to work.

The owners have lived at this location since 2008, with no usable private outdoor space due to an unfortunately located detached garage. Our proposal creates a backyard where none currently exists by relocating this garage to the other street frontage, and makes it more usable by attaching it the house.

When we recently submitted our project to the City Architect for his preliminary review, his comment was that ours was the first project he had seen of four that day in which he didn’t have to send the applicants away unhappy with major design changes.