Darling Flower Shop
University Avenue, Berkeley
Darling Flower Shop Building
2004, Berkeley CA
Mixed-Use infill housing
Area: 32,310 SF

A local Berkeley business, the Darling Flower Shop, wished to develop more value from the property it had occupied over the last sixty-five years. Instead of selling, the owner became partners in a project that maintains a commercial storefront for the business while adding four floors of apartments and a roof garden. The upper floors provide 35 apartments: studio, one bedroom and two bedroom units. 20% of the units, distributed among the building, are classified affordable housing, providing much needed housing for the downtown and for the neighboring U.C. Berkeley campus. Open space requirements are provided for on the roof, which includes a 3,500 square foot deck with built-in seating and landscape walls of varying heights onto which vines grow to enclose larger and smaller spaces. It enables visitors to have views on both the East Bay Hills and the San Francisco Bay.

The building materials are utilized in a way to harmonize with the scale and rhythms of the surrounding buildings, and in accordance with Berkeley’s downtown design guidelines. It makes maximum use of the allowable height for wood framing (50 feet). The non-combustible ground floor podium provides parking, apartment access, and a new storefront for the original flower shop. It makes use of concrete shear walls which allow for a large amount of glazing to be used throughout the upper levels on the long sides of the building. The simplicity of the wood framing meant that the walls could remain free of plywood and structural posts, allowing easier installation of mechanical vents and faster framing. The careful choice of the siding boards on the University Avenue elevation enabled the building to harmonize its color and texture scale with the neighboring brick Hotel Stark.

On the roof deck, the exclusive use of standard wood framing lumber allowed the entire structure of the wooden landscape system to sit on top of the roof without any penetrations. Panel uprights (built off-site), are based on four foot modules integrated with the planter layout, the deck framing, and wire mesh panels. Wood panels on the façade bays of the building and on the side allow free air circulation around the boards, protecting the wood from rot and making it a viable maintenance-free building material for such a large project.

On the long western façade, operable wooden shutters regulate the low western light while giving privacy from the street. The shutters can change with the pattern of living of each individual tenant. Mitigating the glare with wood shutters allows a large amount of glazing to be used throughout the long sides of the building, giving relatively small apartments a more spacious feel, while limiting the thermal impact of the direct after-noon sunlight.

On the roof garden, as the vines grow, the panels will form green walls, visible from the street, suggesting a new way on inhabiting city roofs while instilling a green livable space on a densely built site. The layout of the walls is designed to create a variety of spaces for public gatherings and private contemplation.