From the suburban street in Fairfax, in California’s western Marin County, only a pop of colour in the form of a row of bright yellow clerestory windows hints at the creative world behind the wooden fence. They announce the arrival of a brand new garden studio, created in the backyard of a historic property by Northern Californian design and architecture firm ONO.
Founded in 2020 by architects Tyler Noblin and Max Obata, who met while working at Snøhetta, ONO aims to create ‘thoughtful yet provocative workplaces’ and ‘iconic yet liveable residences’. The team works from a San Francisco studio full of plants, drawings and music, and were perfectly attuned to the challenges of designing a creative yet practical space.
Tour this characterful garden studio in California
ONO’s Two-Fold garden studio was commissioned by the owners of a 1912 home in Fairfax, a general contractor and a ceramic artist and Pilates teacher. The brief asked for a multifunctional garden pavilion that felt equally pragmatic and unusual, befitting of the surrounding undulating hills and greenery. ONO’s core goals were to ‘design a structure that extended all the way to the property line without feeling imposing while maintaining a strong connection to the landscape and creating a natural, airy interior’.
Created with a keen awareness of the historic home at the front of the property, the new building features a natural cedar shingle façade that echoes the original home. Its modified L-shaped form folds around cherished existing trees to frame an intimate courtyard, while the interior creates two distinct spaces: an artist’s studio opening onto the courtyard; and a Pilates studio accessed through a large pivoting screen door.
‘The site is an irregularly shaped corner lot with a significant slope, many stone retaining walls, and an existing main house with a distinct character that needed to be respected,’ explains Obata. ‘These constraints pushed us toward something we wouldn’t have found on a more straightforward site. We set the building quite close to the front street to create a protected courtyard between it, a significant retaining wall, and the main house.’
Drawing inspiration from Kyoto’s Ryoanji Rock Garden, ONO treated the structure as a viewing pavilion that can be completely opened to the surrounding landscape. ‘The courtyard idea led us to think carefully about how someone actually looks at a garden,’ says Obata.
‘We had explored the Ryoanji rock garden in prior research, and one of its core ideas stayed with us: that lifting a viewer even slightly above the ground plane changes their relationship to the landscape. You become a beholder rather than a participant. We applied that directly here. The studio floor is raised just enough above the courtyard that when you're working or moving through a pilates session, you're looking down onto the garden.’
The studio’s roof extends to shade the low wooden deck, effectively creating a third space within the small footprint. Sliding doors connect the courtyard garden and studio, which is oriented to catch the evening sun. Meanwhile, the Pilates studio is illuminated in the morning and faces the historic house.
At the back of the structure, the yellow clerestory windows funnel light into the studio, creating sightlines of the surrounding tree canopies while preserving privacy. ‘They’re a favourite of ours because of what they reveal about how the building was made. Our builder was also our client, and he brought a level of care that you don’t often get in this type of project.
‘With the clerestory windows, you can trace a continuous line from each structural bay down through the window mullions and into the wall below, following the load path through the building. It’s quiet but precise. And in summer, with the large sliding doors thrown open, the afternoon light comes in late and high, and our client can work on her ceramics well into the evening, while enjoying privacy from the street.’
As for the bright, sunny yellow colour of the window frames, it reflects the art being created inside. ‘Our client works with bold colour in her ceramics, so we knew the palette had to be able to hold its own,’ explains Obata.
‘We kept the material language simple: natural cedar, zinc countertops, blue-stained millwork. Within that, the yellow windows found their place immediately. They work against the warm reddish brown of fresh cedar, and they will work even better as the cedar ages to silver grey,’ he continues. ‘There's also something about them facing the street. The yellow is a signal to anyone passing by: we want our privacy, but we're friendly neighbours!’