Meant to be a bar. Trou Normand is situated in a storied building in downtown San Francisco. It the the second outpost in a line of establishments by Thad Vogler where you can dine heartily and get an amazing cocktail. Well worn. Loved, not precious.

This place is small. It is small enough to be another room in the collective neighborhood home. It is small enough to duck in, move through, slip out again. It is small enough to linger as you might, absent-minded, stop to gaze at your mail because you happened to pick it up while in a beam of rare San Francisco sunlight on your stoop. This the 2nd Sightglass location is a well appointed production space on a smaller scale. Here they roast coffee for the neighborhood and serve it by a window. Upstairs, in secret, magical things happen in the wholesale lab and office. Custom light fixtures and a highly detailed everything stay out of your way in this inviting nook off of 20th street. Seth Boor was the design lead and architect of record for this project and every Sightglass building project from concept through construction. Seth continues to collaborate with Sightglass on projects that build on the creative relationship we began in 2009.

This is better than, but a little like, your first kitchen in that first apartment. Roommates, dinner parties, everything is painted landlord-white. The backyard lets all this light in and there is nothing but potential, nowhere to go but up.

This project was about transparency and collaboration. In the interest of transparency layer after layer of this old San Francisco signage shop got peeled away. Probably more was removed than was added. The bits that were added back were collaborative and improvisation. The client and fabricators were part of the design team. The design team was part of the construction team. Everyone had a job to do but it was hard to tell where the boundaries were. The whole thing went together painfully and enjoyably slow. What we were left with was an open, inviting, and functional factory. You can spend 5 minutes and basically get it. You can spend all day and not feel yucky. Seth Boor was the design lead and architect of record for this project and every Sightglass building project from concept through construction. Seth continues to collaborate with Sightglass on projects that build on the creative relationship we began in 2009.

They lived in the basement for two years and rode motorcycles around the country looking for materials to build a coffee house out of. There was a plan and it was a good one. It changed every day. It was a living plan that absorbed all the energy and matter we fed it and we always seemed to just narrowly avert disaster. The mistakes were celebrated as well as they could be. The mistakes became part of the story in the hopes that the good times would survive the bad. Seth Boor was the design lead and architect of record for this project and every Four Barrel building project from concept through construction.

Seth Boor was the architect of record for this project and the principal in charge for Boor Bridges Architecture from concept through construction.