RANGR STUDIO

Berkeley Chess School was founded in 1981 as an after school program by Elizabeth Shaughnessy, the 1970 Irish Women’s Chess Champion. It has grown today to teach 7,000 children a year in the Bay Area, and has produced an unmatched three grandmasters.
The founder's primary goal, however, has always been to empower children by teaching them chess, a predictor of future success in STEM subjects. The school teaches for free where students would not otherwise have access to after-school programs, holds low-cost summer camps, and Friday night classes through the year.
BCS has been using teaching chess as a tool toward greater social equity for 40 years.
Rangr Studio has designed a simple addition that gives their existing building a prominent presence on a main thoroughfare in Berkeley.
Designed to be inexpensive to build, a storefront wall uses ordinary tinted and translucent panes of glass to create the image of a chessboard. Visitors, students and teachers enter the building behind the chessboard window, metaphorically and literally entering the world of chess.
Scheduled for construction starting in the fall of 2021, the addition contains an entry lobby, ADA platform lift, cafe & waiting area, and a new classroom, all within the available 800 sf footprint.

Located in the Berkeley Hills, on a steep incline facing panoramic views of the San Francisco Bay, the design of this three-level house is guided by seismic constraints, topography, micro-climate, sun path, and the property’s protected oak trees.
To address the risks of earthquakes and landslides, the house is built on grade beams resting on concrete piles embedded in bedrock, avoiding the complexity and expense of excavation and retaining walls. The design includes the first use of residential seismic damper frames which slow the response of the structure in a seismic event and allow it to withstand the maximum predicted earthquake with minimal damage.
Throughout the house, small cantilevers extend space beyond the major structural elements that are directly in-line with the foundations. On the upper level, the most dramatic of the cantilevers extends beyond the western facade, projecting visitors out into the view.
Given a year-round temperate yet chilly climate, the home’s living area is glazed to the south and west, creating a space that maximizes solar heat gain. Large sliding glass doors and high clerestory windows allow cooling breezes to regulate temperature, so the living area feels very much like an exterior covered porch. The middle level remains cooler, and by opening a large glazed door on the lower level, the chimney effect brings more cool air to the upper level.
The house requires very little heating and no air-conditioning. Solar panels on the roof create more than enough electricity for the house and an electric car.
By weaving the design through the site’s constraints and riches, the design creates a warm home lit by golden light, profoundly connected to its landscape with a very low energy footprint.

Rangr Studio’s second house in the Berkeley Hills followed the same principles as the first (House in the Berkeley Hills, above)— using the microclimate to generate solar heat gain in the living area, and exploiting the low humidity to provide effective cross ventilation to cool the space when needed. While both houses are almost the same area, and both face west on a downslope lot, the topography and client needs created a very different form. While the micro-climate demanded a south facing window wall to counter the chilly climate, the topography required a structure that spread along contour lines to minimize concrete grade beam costs. The clients, retiring from their careers, requested that the living, sleeping and bathing spaces all be on the upper floor, with barrier free entry from the street.
The resulting form contains a main bedroom suite with a living / kitchen / dining space spread across the width of the lot.
Because the direction of land’s slope changes as the lot slopes downhill, the form of the house creates a volume that is angled away from the street line— the second angle addresses the change of direction in the topography’s slope to minimize the use of concrete. The resulting angular forms also enhances the panoramic view over the San Fransisco Bay— with the west living room window wall faces the Marin headlands and Golden Gate Bridge, the edge of the deck faces San Fransisco. The south facing windows and southern edge of the deck face the UC Berkeley campus, and Berkeley’s famous Telegraph Avenue all the way to Oakland.

The companion structures to the Hudson Valley Compound (above) are a small guest house and a barn. Both take advantage of a sloped site by benching into their respective hills. The guest house, while quite close to the main house, is barely visible as it is tucked into the slope. It overlooks the river bordering the property, bringing the soothing sound of rushing water into its spaces.
The barn contains a large space, tall enough for basketball, and a mezzanine at one end that creates a secret space for children to play.

Three long cantilevers on the top of a secluded hill give the spaces of the house commanding views into the woods and the feeling of being suspended in the trees. The living and dining spaces combine to form a Great Room, with a wall of sliding glass doors looking out onto the pool and deck. The house, for a young family of five, contains two master suites and three additional bedrooms, allowing the owners to accommodate friends with their children. The large screen porch, on one of the cantilevered ends of the house, contains an outdoor fireplace and creates the feeling of being in a tree house. The pool's design creates the illusion of a body of water tautly suspended between two stone walls with the infinity edge beckoning to the trees beyond.

Casa Kimball is a private beach house and luxury rental villa located on the North coast of the Dominican Republic. Situated on a cliff with a panoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean, each of eight full suites has a breathtaking view out to the ocean. The buildings are designed to protect from views of neighboring villas, heightening the experience of the vast horizon beyond. The interior spaces merge with the gardens, and are designed to allow ocean breezes under shade from the sun throughout the year. Light at sunset rakes through trees, casting dappled sunlight on the light stone floors in the evening. A long infinity edge pool creates a seamless edge of water in front of the ocean, hiding terraces and a hot-tub at cliff edge that allow visitors to experience the ocean's roar as waves break on the rocks below.
The villa is about 20,000 square feet, and includes two indoor and two outdoor lounges, a dining room with a view centered on the pool out to the ocean, and an outdoor bar area.

The design of this floor-through renovation re-connected the 50’ long Northern and Southern glass walls. Since the loft is on the set-back floor of the building, the condo board allowed the full replacement of the existing glazing system— the new windows doubled the size of each glass pane and removed horizontal mullions, bringing the interiors to a closer relationship with the outdoor terraces. The spaces at the North side of the loft received enhanced views of the Empire state building, across the low lying building of Chelsea. The renovation turned the loft into an open and airy three bedroom, two bath home. Existing loft features (concrete plank ceilings, sprinkler pipes) were exposed where possible, with more finished spaces inserted between the structure and piping of the building. The resulting space feels both calm and comfortable while retaining the unique vernacular of NYC lofts.

After years of renting a weekend house in the area, our clients found land they loved and asked us to design a weekend and summer home. The clients were particularly fond of one of their previous rentals — a chicken coop turned into a small house — and that became a departure point for our design. Within a strict budget, the design took advantage of a steep slope in the hillside, using the foundation as a retaining wall on the high point of the hill and opening up the lower story with doors and windows. The house looks small and humble from the street side, with a mostly opaque wall creating privacy, but opens up to a deck and stone terrace, the facade punctured with windows looking west to the Catskill Mountains.
The house contains four bedrooms, two-and-a-half bathrooms, a large living / kitchen / dining area, and a family room. A year after it was completed, the clients added a pool and cabana in a meadow down a path to the woods.

Our design for sleeping pods at a yoga retreat was the answer to the question, “what is the simplest a sleeping cabin can be?”
The solution locates the essential functions of shower, water closet, and storage in three inhabitable columns, arranged to create a sleeping space between them, just large enough to suspend two people in the trees.
With a square footage at half the suggested area in the competition brief, the pod posits the smallest possible impact on the landscape. Framed with local lumber, the solid forms serve as columns that land on small concrete footings, as permitted by the International Building Code. The design minimizes both the amount of excavation required and the total embodied energy of construction and materials.
A water storage tank, water heater and composting toilet tank are located beneath the floor, eliminating the need for a septic field, trenches and pipes. If guests use biodegradable soaps and shampoos, grey water from washing can irrigate the landscape below without further treatment.
The pod creates a space for sleeping amongst the trees, with two large folding windows that open to the forest. A skylight above the sleeping area frames a view of the night sky: "a square of stars ... suggesting the abstract and large.”^1
1 From "Rules of Sleep," by Howard Moss

On their first trip to the Grand Canyon, our clients were disappointed at the options in local lodging— nothing available offered an authentic experience of the high Sonoran desert. They bought a 40 acre parcel with no utilities, and partnered up with two Grand Canyon guides who would build and run a set of cabins to host 16 couples with a central lodge. We were asked to design these cabins and lodge within the following constraints:
• inexpensive;
• buildable by two people;
• materials transportable by pick-up truck via a dirt road;
• off-grid;
• heighten the experience of desert solitude.
The local building department encouraged us to divide the property into four 10 acre lots, within we could design two small lodging structures using “tiny house” building regulations.
We paired up two lodging units into one cabin. A mechanical space between the units would provide a space for shared infrastructure — water heater, solar inventor, battery, and space for all plumbing. The units of each cabin have porches on opposite diagonals for privacy.
Each cabin was paired up with another cabin, creating communal space between them— allowing lodgers to form ad-hoc communities during their visit. The pairing puts the cabins into a diagonal relationship with each other, preserving the privacy of each porch looking either at Humphreys Peak to the North, or Williams Peak to the South.
A lodge building provides a reception, lounge, and dining space, and is designed to allow a food truck to pull up to a window, allowing the truck to act as supply transport and kitchen.
After hiking the Grand Canyon, we imagined visitors returning to their temporary homes in the high desert, making a small community with their fellow visitors, before retiring to their cabins with roofs etched into the starry night sky.

The client for this project was smitten after seeing published images of Casa Kimball (see above). He initially wanted a scaled down version for his house, but his site was vastly different and demanded a completely different design.
The site is made up of two small lots, both flat, but one about 1.5m above the other. The resulting design made use of the difference in height, and the existing topographical depression between the two lots. Minimizing site disturbance and excavation, the design places a garage and entrance between the two lots in the topographical depression. Stairs lead to the main level of the house, which includes two bedrooms and a wide living / dining / kitchen area with spectacular views of the Costa Rican mountainous landscape and beaches world-famous among surfers. A third bedroom is hidden in the upper garden, as a separate apartment for guests.
The design of the immediate landscape around the proposed house is as important as the form of the house itself— each depends upon the other. By designing garden and house and pool the same time, the resulting plans will make a serene yet sublime home — a place protected by stone clad concrete walls to witness the drama of rainforest weather and storms over the mighty ocean.