A Victorian that earns its keep.

The building is a 1914 Victorian duplex on Potrero Hill, purchased by a family of five who needed more space than the original layout offered. The property had sat largely untouched for decades. Two evenly divided apartments stacked one above the other, each too small on its own for a family with three children, but together offering real potential if the internal logic could be rethought. Studio Graf's brief was to reorganise the building around the family's actual needs while preserving its historic exterior and continuing to generate rental income.

That meant reshuffling the two apartments into an unequal division: a generous owner's residence that could genuinely accommodate a family of five, and a smaller self-contained rental unit.

The owner's residence occupies the upper floor and wraps down along the courtyard side of the lower floor, giving the family two levels with expanded exposure to the rear courtyard. The full backyard is theirs. Public living spaces and the master suite open onto the garden, and a spacious attic level captures views over the city skyline. The rental unit occupies the remaining ground-floor space, self-contained and independently accessed, with its own two bedrooms.

Externally, the building looks essentially as it did in 1914. The Victorian facade, the massing, and the overall square footage were preserved. All the work happened inside, where the plan was fundamentally rethought without changing the building's presence on the street.

The interiors reflect the personal sensibility of the owners, who took a hands-on role in curating the finishes and layering their art collection through the home. The result is a residence that reads as both a considered architectural rework and a genuinely lived-in family home.