Firm Summary:
Graham Simmons, Architect and Builder is an architecture firm and design/build business with offices in Berkeley and Kirkwood, California. We provide residential and commercial architectural services for clients looking for pleasing and practical design solutions, as well as offering the highest level of craftsmanship to selected construction projects.
Our focus is architectural design tailored to the individual client’s needs and desires, with functional solutions to difficult site and environmental parameters. Alpine architecture is a specialty, and we have broad experience solving the design problems and capturing the beauty of the mountain environment. We have also designed for the hot summer climates of the Sierra foothills and Carson Valley, in milder coastal settings, on gentle terrain, and in urban surroundings. The client’s requirements and specific challenges of the site always steer our design work, which is elemental to our philosophy about design.
Graham Simmons, Architect and Builder is a general contracting business as well as an architectural firm. We construct one or two projects at a time, in addition to ongoing design work to be built by other contractors. We have a full time crew that constructs projects designed in our studios, enabling us to give these clients complete cycle, “single source of responsibility” service. Our construction experience benefits all of our clients through a knowledge base of current building costs, allowing us to effectively design with respect to a project’s budget.
Design Process:
Our design process begins with a series of interviews, site visits, magazines, books, and field trips in which together we research and discuss options that could be pursued as a strategy for your design project. We believe in being all ears and eyes at the outset of a project, listening intently to understand what you, the client, want. We do contemporary architecture, in that we approach design as a problem-solving task of specific current parameters, for people living a modern lifestyle. We are, however, both fanatical about old buildings and enthusiasts of emerging technologies, so that the design solution may be rendered with the spirit and characteristics of an older architectural tradition, or as a fresh exploration of new systems. We elicit from you what direction to take. We do not do reproductions of any architectural style, but enjoy working with all, integrating the essential traits and palette of materials appreciated by the client into the context of their own design program.
Design Work:
Our design work is done in three dimensions based on a structural system chosen as the foundation for an aesthetic order. An integration of the structural and architectural solutions is fundamental to our work, and engineering is performed in-house concurrent with the architectural development. We have been very fortunate to work for clients with a wide variety of aesthetic tastes and have developed architecture with logs, steel, timbers, concrete, straw bales. and stone as starting points. Creating an aesthetically pleasing structural framework is central to our design work and is the logical grid against which order and counterpoint are presented in the architecture and décor. Our architectural ornamentation and structural details are unified and appropriate to the characteristics of the materials, style and systems chosen, giving each building we design a unique thematic language.
Energy Efficient Designs:
We are passionate advocates of energy efficient design. Our projects are always designed and sited with consideration of the sun’s path. We normally incorporate strategies to passively or actively temper the building with the sun, be it careful placement of a sunny window, or complete development of solar heating and photovoltaic electrical systems. We use natural lighting frequently and effectively, and our quest for quality daylight often guides the geometry of our buildings. To conserve energy, we implement structural insulated panels, insulating concrete forms, energy recovery ventilators and other technologies to provide thermal comfort while reducing energy consumption.
