So when her husband John Dunham sold in 2002 his start-up Caw Networks, which made network testing appliances, the couple set out to fulfill their long-held dream of living in the city in a home with a spacious—indoor—art studio.
Completed in 2007 for $3 million, the couple's modern, metal-wrapped home rises just shy of 50 feet in an alley near the gritty southern outskirts of San Francisco's South of Market district, a once-industrial area now dotted with bars, loft developments and dot-coms like Twitter and Zynga.
Boxy windows and cutouts puncture the building's fortress-like grey façade, made of foam-insulated metal panels more typically used to clad commercial buildings. Inside, the 4,620-square-foot, two-bedroom, 3½-bath home is organized around a four-story, steel staircase shaft wrapped by a floating, Brazilian cherry staircase.
Visitors enter through a 10-foot-tall steel door and step into a canyon-like, concrete hallway open to the sky, leading to separate entrances to the home and Ms. Kawano's ground-floor art studio. This time around, Ms. Kawano had to make few concessions. Her new studio has concrete floors, 22-foot ceilings and exposed steel beams; a wall of glass looks onto a bamboo-screened garden with a fountain and stone-sculpting area. Ms. Kawano's office and a sunken tatami guest room, where the floors are made of mats, comprise the second floor.
The main living spaces are on the third and fourth floors to take advantage of the city views. Most of the third level is taken up by an open kitchen-living-dining area. Custom stained kaya cabinets conceal clutter and a smoothie station. With three walls of glass, two of which open to an outdoor kitchen and deck, the 550-square-foot space feels larger than it is.
The third floor also has Mr. Dunham's office, where he works on his current start-up Sauce Labs, which tests websites and applications for compatibility across browsers. The master bedroom, bath and another deck make up most of the fourth floor.
The lot's 25-by-100-foot dimensions set the design concept early on. "The idea of vertical circulation tied everything together," said architect Olle Lundberg, whose portfolio includes Twitter's headquarters and Larry Ellison's Pacific Heights home. He noted that a more typical height restriction for a single-family home in the city is 35 feet.
Homes on long, skinny lots can sometimes feel cramped, said architect Michelle Kriebel, who managed the project for Lundberg Design. But in this case the canyon-like hallway on the ground floor lets more light into the home. One side of the hallway is an exterior wall of metal, with large cut-outs; the interior wall is glass. "The light allows the spaces to feel a lot bigger," she said.
On a balmy evening, the house was a flurry of activity as a dinner party got under way. Mr. Dunham poured drinks as Ms. Kawano and some of her friends from dance class set the table. Slanted Door chef Charles Phan, a friend of Mr. Lundberg's who had advised Mr. Dunham on his outdoor kitchen, tossed a grapefruit and jicama salad as he directed kitchen traffic.
Later, after a multi-course dinner, the group retired to the rooftop, wineglasses in hand and city lights below.
