ROOF YARD © San Francisco, CA

How, and why, do you extend a yard onto a roof?

This home had yards on all four sides, an unusual condition in San Francisco. However, being a large house in the middle of the city, all were too small and steep to be utilized as outdoor living spaces.

The solution was to infill a small, steep space at one corner of the lot with new soil and extend it onto the adjacent garage, the only single-story portion of this three-story house, at the opposite corner. The resulting yard, down a few steps from an existing deck at the main living level, contains a large flat grassy area at the top, which gives way to a gentle slope that leads down to a seating area atop the garage. Privacy from the street is provided by a 5’ deep planter on two sides, a minimum setback required by the city for occupied roofs.

Around the other side of the house from the new flat lawn and up a few steps, another deck with an outdoor kitchen built into a new retaining wall, all designed to match the existing Spanish revival style home, wraps the yard around the house and completes a seamless indoor-outdoor space on three sides of the main interior living areas. A sink, BBQ, and Pizza oven make this previously unusable space yet another special destination.

Working with David Thorne Landscape Architects, lush plantings in deep soil throughout these new outdoor spaces create the illusion that one is standing on the ground, which, in a sense, you are. A highly technical challenge on a steep, unstable slope, LLA led a team of structural, geotechnical, and civil engineers to design a sophisticated intensive green roof system that could handle the immense weight of the soil, water, and plants and protect the building envelope.