When the VC firm ARTIS Ventures moved from their office on Market Street to a new location in the Jackson Square area, they traded a gritty downtown intersection for a quieter neighborhood steeped in San Francisco history. The brick-and-stone architecture in this once-notorious Barbary Coast district is among the city’s oldest—some of it dating back to the Gold Rush era. Now the home of boutiques, restaurants, and antique shops, the area offers an upscale variation on the urban energy that prevailed at the Market Street site. 

ARTIS wanted to keep that energy and the jewel box execution Studio O+A brought to their former office while offering clients the hospitality and comfort of a gentler Barbary Coast. It also wanted a clean, gallery-like space for ARTIS’s art-loving CEO Stuart Peterson to display some of his personal collection. The building that ARTIS moved into was not the Gold Rush bank that once occupied the site (that structure was torn down in the mid-1960s). But the one that replaced it had a colorful provenance of its own. In the 1970s, it was the home of the San Francisco Playboy Club.

The design team saw in the brick beneath the drywall and in the remnants of what appeared to be a builder’s markings an architectural record of how thoroughly times, and values, change. The exposed brick is more accent than central story here, but it shoots through the finished space an undercurrent of history. The central story of this project is literally that: central. A load-bearing wall that bisects the space felt like an impediment to the welcoming spirit Artis wanted to convey. 

O+A’s solution was to unite the spaces on either side with a single, encircling ribbon of activity—all focused on hospitality. A combination reception and barista station is the first thing you see off the elevator; then a lounge area for informal gathering; then through the wall to the pantry area and around full circle to a drop-in workstation. With a work surface that optically appears to come all the way around and a mirroring of finishes on each side of the divide, the impact is one of shared vitality, shared purpose. 

In this office, as in ARTIS’s prior space, O+A wanted to give the firm’s small staff, clients and guests a space with the comfort and informality of an apartment. The “workstation” is a large table where staff can sit with laptops. Lighting and furniture, some of it drawn from the CEO’s personal collection, give the space’s nooks and perches a rare intimacy. A glass-walled conference room is the one concession to “office design,” but its placement opposite the kitchen area gives the space a comfortably informal feel. 

Venture capital investing is all about curating the future by cultivating the cultural change we want to see—O+A’s design for ARTIS Ventures’ Jackson Square office recognizes the fluid nature of that project. Finding success in a great idea without losing the vitality and integrity of its origins is a goal investors and designers share.