Residential & Building Design
Site-first design for houses and small buildings on the Central Coast — begun in the dirt, resolved on paper, carried through to the last day on site.
A building should read as if the site asked for it.
SloIvy's design practice shapes houses and small buildings for the ground they stand on — the slope, the wind, the long afternoon light of the Central Coast. We begin every project outside, walking the parcel before anyone opens a laptop, because the site settles most of the questions a design will ever face.
We are a design studio, not a licensed design professional. Our work is developed in collaboration with licensed architects and engineers, who review, stamp, and carry the drawings where California law requires it. That partnership is built into how we practice, not bolted on at permit time — our licensed partners are in the room from schematic design forward.
Most of what we design, we also develop and build. Designing for our own account changes the drawings: every line has to survive a budget, a building department, and twenty winters of coastal weather. We hold ourselves to that standard whether the project is ours or a client's.
How we approach a site
Site · Light · Material
Site first
Before form, the ground. We map the sun path, the prevailing wind off the water, the drainage, the oaks worth keeping, and the views a house should hold onto and the ones it should let go. On the Central Coast, a design that ignores the marine layer or the afternoon westerlies is a design that will be corrected later, expensively.
Light as a material
The light here is particular — fog until ten, then hours of hard, clear sun. We design rooms around how they will be lit at the hours they are actually used: morning light in kitchens, low western light held back from bedrooms, deep eaves where the summer sun needs tempering. Glass is placed, not applied.
An oak savanna palette
Our material language comes from the hills between San Luis Obispo and Edna Valley — bone-colored plaster and lime wash, white oak, board-formed concrete the color of dry grass, blackened steel, standing-seam roofs that quiet to the tone of the sky. Materials that weather rather than age, chosen to look better in year ten than year one.
The process
From parcel to permit set- Feasibility & massing
- Zoning and setback analysis, buildable-area studies, and rough massing on the actual topography. We tell you what the parcel will support before design begins — including when the honest answer is that it won't support what you had in mind.
- Schematic design
- Plans, sections, and study models that fix the big decisions: where the building sits, how it meets the ground, where the light comes from. We work slowly here on purpose. A week saved in schematic design is usually repaid, with interest, in framing.
- Design development
- The scheme becomes specific — structure, envelope, windows and doors, the material palette down to finish samples in hand. Interiors join the table at this stage, so the rooms and the shell are resolved as one thing.
- Documentation with licensed partners
- Construction documents prepared in collaboration with licensed architects and engineers, who review and stamp the work as California requires. We manage the drawing set, the consultants, and the conversation with the building department through permit issuance. Before anything is issued, plans, models, and renders are evaluated with the latest analysis tools — a second, tireless review on every sheet.
- Design during construction
- The drawings do not retire when the permit issues. We stay through construction — reviewing submittals, answering field questions, and walking the site — so the built work matches the intent, not merely the paperwork.
“We would rather resolve a detail on paper for a month than apologize for it in a room for thirty years.”
Drawn to be built.
A drawing set is a promise about how a building will go together. Ours are written for the people who will keep that promise — the framer, the plasterer, the inspector on a Tuesday morning. Fewer sheets, more decisions; details drawn once, correctly, at a scale a tradesperson can hold in one hand.
Because we build what we develop, our sets are tested against reality on our own projects first. What survives the field becomes the standard.
The interiors practiceDesign does not stop at the shell
One studio · One standard
Considering a house or small building on the Central Coast?
We take on few design engagements a year, and we begin every one the same way — on the site, listening. Write to the studio and tell us about the ground.