1989-1990 Western Home Awards - includes 20 winners in this year's biennial program

SPECIAL AWARD FOR RESTORATION / Heidi Richardson; William Turnbull Associates, San Francisco One guidebook describes this 1914 house hugging a steep Berkeley hillside as "a small-scale Florentine palazzo gracefully executed in the Berkeley shingle style." How do you remodel an architectural icon? The answer: as seamlessly as possible-and with close attention to existing proportions and materials.

The owners wanted to update the old, warren-like kitchen, enlarge the living room, and modernize the bathrooms. To expand the living room, the architects enclosed the old veranda on the east side, creating a large, carefully proportioned window bay framed by two turned columns that echo the shape of the newel post in the front hall.

The kitchen, revamped as an airy and efficient galley, also runs along the house's east side. Dutch doors at each end open to the deck and garden. Understated materials-such as vertical-grain fir for cabinetry, white Corian for countertops, and yellow-tan tile for the backsplashcomplement the Craftsman-era detailing of the original bouse.

CITATION / Kotas/Pantaleoni Architects, San Francisco Choreographing the climb and capitalizing on the view were the objectives in the. design of this 1,800-square-foot row house on a steep San Francisco hill.

To enjoy the dramatic view from the hill, the main living areas were put on the top floor. The journey up to these spaces was given its own visual excitement.

Structurally, the house has two main elements: a platform on top of the streetlevel garage, and a two-story tower set back against the hill. A stairway leads up past the garage, across a roof deck bordered by the fanciful picket fence, and up another stairway (railed with diagonal boards) to the front door on the middle level. The climb resembles a walk up one of the city's famous stair-streets.

Inside, the journey continues past a downstairs guest room and bath, then up to the living-dining room and kitchen, which face the view. Behind the living room sit a study and the master bedroom, which overlooks a hilltop garden. AWARD OF MERIT / Fernau & Hartman Architects, Berkeley, for Helen Berggruen A rural compound that looks indigenous and contemporary at the same time: that's the impression created by this house on an oak-studded site in northern California's wine country.

Originally, several small, foundationless, wood-and-tin shacks-probably used as housing for farm workers-lay scattered about the site. The memory of their informal, bunkhouse character serves as the underlying concept for the new house.

The architects designed its major components to suggest the separate structures of an early California ranch-from cookhouse to water tower to gatehouse. In this case the cookhouse (or kitchen) has extensions housing a small living room and a study, tbe tower contains a bedroom and a studio instead of a water tank, and the gatehouse functions as a second studio all suiting the needs of the owners, who are painters. An outdoor dining pavilion, detached from the rest of the house, faces the central courtyard opposite the tower. Ordinary rural building materialsboard-and-batten siding, corrugated metal siding, redwood tree-trunk columns reinforce the notion of a rustic ranch compound. Each major section of the house, treated as a visually distinct structure no more than one room wide, contributes to the impression of a small village or permanent encampment that expanded across its site over the years. The architects also paid close attention to daylighting and views in order to underscore the feeling that each major room is set apart in the landscape.