How They Pulled It Off: A Former Earthquake Shack Becomes an Airy Dining Room

Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.

There are 5,610 single-story structures, colloquially called “earthquake shacks,” that dot San Francisco. Built after the 1906 earthquake wiped out 500 city blocks, these buildings were initially constructed as temporary housing for over 17,000 residents. Each wooden cottage was around 200 square feet with a dark-green exterior, tiny but just big enough for a family to use as shelter. The exact number of remaining shacks is unclear; however, the location of one very particular earthquake shack is known: it’s at the back of San Francisco, Dublin, and Kingston-based Síol Studios’ latest project.  

From the outside, the main house, behind which the shack sits, looked like one of the city’s many typical architectural jewels: an Eastlake Victorian from 1885 in near-pristine condition. However, the exterior masked decades of multiple hodgepodge interior renovations. “Each [renovation] was painful in some respect,” says Síol Studios cofounder and principal Kevin Hackett. “The flow was lost.” When he and the team started work, the interior was dark and tight with a chaotic layout. But it had one upside: the earthquake shack in the back, once used as a lackluster dining room and now ripe for revitalization.