Details
This landscape for a new hillside development offers a new perspective on the site, the neighborhood, and the nearby grove of Monterey cypress trees.
San Francisco's Gold Mine Hill is a dense, charming residential neighborhood with a mid-century vibe and shady cypress trees.1900 Diamond Street is a unique residential project in the area that reflects the neighborhood style and skillfully navigates a heavily constrained sliver of a lot. Inspired by the narrow, steep, and unusually shaped building site, Groundworks Office developed a new public landscape for this project that celebrates the city’s topography while helping the community move across it.
The thin triangle-shaped lot is the result of San Francisco’s quirky street grid and hilly topography. From tip to tail, the grade changes by more than 60 feet across the site. To help residents and locals navigate the slope, we designed a switchback stair at the center of the development that cascades down the hill between colorful native shrubs, grasses and flowers. Their sweet smell will fill the site in spring, support area pollinators, and cultivate a stronger connection between the people and the place they live.
We worked with the developer to create an inviting public amenity at the heart of this private residential project. At the top of the hill, reached via the switchback stair, an overlook deck offers a new view toward downtown San Francisco and beyond to the Bay, looking over the crowns of 14 carefully preserved heritage Monterey cypress trees—Cupressus macrocarpas—anchored to the hillside. Our landscape helps not only complements the buildings design, it helps weave the project into its surrounding neighborhood, creating a new sense of place rooted in local ecology.