About
A six person studio that draws everything first.
Founded in 2016 by Elena Marsh, after a decade of watching good houses get ruined by a rushed tile pick. We are upstairs at 22 University Ave, above the bakery.
The story
Elena ran projects for a big firm in San Francisco. The houses were beautiful in the magazine and annoying to live in. The drawers were wrong.
So she started a studio where the drawings come first and the shopping comes last. In 2016 that meant Elena, a laptop and a borrowed plotter. Today it is six people, one floor of an old building on University Ave, and about fourteen houses a year. We keep it small on purpose. Every project gets a principal in the room, not just on the proposal.
We work in Los Gatos, Saratoga, Monte Sereno, Campbell, Los Altos and the west side of San Jose. Most of our houses are ranches from the sixties and seventies, Craftsman bungalows in Willow Glen, and the occasional new build in the hills. We like old houses with good bones and owners who plan to stay.
The studio is a working space, not a showroom. There is a long table covered in trace paper, two walls of samples and a plotter that is always printing something. Clients come in to look at stone under daylight and to sit on the chair before they buy twelve of them.
How we work
Drawings are the whole job.
A kitchen gets forty to sixty drawings before it gets a single tile. Plans, elevations, sections through every cabinet run, a lighting plan, an outlet plan, a plumbing rough-in plan. It sounds like too much until the bids come back and they are all within a few percent of each other, because every contractor priced the same thing.
We measure the house ourselves. We draw it in the software, then we print it at full scale and tape it to the floor so you can walk the island. Most changes happen on that afternoon, on paper, for free. The same change after the cabinets are ordered costs three weeks and real money.
We do not sell furniture or take a cut from vendors you cannot see. Trade pricing goes to you. Our fee is our fee, written down before we start.
Contractors
We work with yours, or introduce you to three of ours.
We are designers, not a design-build firm. That is on purpose. It means the person checking the work is not the person doing it. We have worked beside a dozen local contractors long enough to know who returns calls and who pours a level slab. If you do not have one, we introduce three and you interview them.
During the build, a designer is on site every week. We answer the questions the contractor would otherwise ask you at 7am: where the outlet goes, how high the sconce sits, which way the tile runs. You get a weekly note with photos and the decisions made.
We also tell you the uncomfortable things early. If the budget does not cover the plan, you hear it in week two, not month six.