The Best of Both Worlds

At her San Francisco home, emerging architect Monica Sanga cleverly bridges past and present

- ELIZABETH FAZZARE

In a city of hills, it's all about the views. That's certainly how architect Monica Sanga approached her recent redesign of the 1886 Victorian house in San Francisco that she shares with her husband, software engineer Arjun Banker. From the street, the home appears to be a one-story cottage atop a bluff. But inside, original doors open onto three levels of terraces, with panoramic vistas of the city and the East Bay.

"It just feels like this little antechamber that takes you to another world," says Sanga, who founded her own firm in 2017 after cutting her teeth at Snøhetta and Spiegel Aihara Workshop. Banker and Sanga purchased the home four years ago, living in it for a year before embarking on a renovation to emphasize the surrounding natural beauty. The goal was to balance its historic layout with the needs of contemporary living, incorporating technology and enhancing that quintessentially Californian indoor-outdoor feel.