Office suites, 9th Street, downtown Sacramento

After the county, Sheriff Internal Affairs, and state Inspector General tenants moved out in 2009, we remodeled this downtown Sacramento building suite by suite. The second-floor spaces that later became a law office and a hospice and home health suite started as Sacramento County Court Divisions 56 and 57 — plain, dark, dingy rooms under T-bar ceilings with no natural light.

We pulled the T-bar down, exposed and cleaned up the beams, and opened the floor plans. The back wall sits on the property line and had been windowless — like a dungeon. We had engineered custom windows made; the building department classified them as a “transparent wall,” so that whole wall now brings in daylight. On the alley side we cut the roof back to the parapet and added high clerestory windows.

Along the wall dividing the barrel-roof area from the hallway ran a long corridor about five feet wide. At the roof we ran a row of skylights down that light well, and the offices on each side got windows onto it — so they now look across at each other through natural light instead of drywall and darkness.