A historic flat, opened for a modern family.

Perched high on Russian Hill in a 1915 co-op building, this 2,570-square-foot flat offered rare bones. Sweeping city views, generous ceilings, and rounded bay windows all pointed to real potential. But the floor plan reflected an earlier era of urban living. Walls separated the living room, dining room, and kitchen into small, self-contained spaces. The bedrooms and bathrooms were compact and inefficient. For the family who bought it, active hosts with a busy household, the compartmentalized layout was fundamentally at odds with how they actually wanted to live.

Studio Graf's brief was to rework the interior around a clear spatial idea: open where the family gathers, cellular where they retreat.

Achieving that meant taking the flat back to its concrete shell and rethinking it from scratch. On the public side, walls between the kitchen, dining, and living areas were removed to create one continuous entertaining space, framed by the original bay windows and their unbroken views of the city. Removing structural walls in a century-old building is not a small undertaking. Each opening required careful structural engineering and close coordination with the co-op board, which oversees any modification to a building of this age and standing. The result reads as a single generous room where cooking, dining, gathering, and lounging happen in easy proximity, the way the family actually lives.

On the private side, the logic reversed. Rooms were reconfigured to add a study that also functions as a fourth bedroom, and to expand the primary suite into a proper private retreat with distant views of the Golden Gate Bridge. Bathrooms and closets were reworked for real usability. Every square foot on the sleeping side was made to work harder. More rooms, better proportioned, quieter.

The interior palette carries the same clarity as the plan: natural stone, warm wood, a custom metal fireplace surround, and clean, restrained detailing throughout. Contemporary in feel, but calibrated to sit comfortably within the historic bones of the building rather than fight them.