SFGate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle's electronic counterpart, recently ran a nice profile of two Bay Area families and the architect who, over the course of their remodels, took the best that modernism had to offer and tempered it with the original character of these homes. I myself am usually more drawn to restoration rather than the kind of updating that architect Sandra Vivanco espouses, but I have to admit that these projects turned out quite well, without the uncomfortable angles and agoraphobic spaces that the modernist aesthetic often introduces.

photograph by David Paul Morris for the SF Chronicle