Bridging two wings of the old hotel, the enclosed courtyard serves as a space for congregation. Photo © Donal Murphy

At the center of the U-shaped building was an open-air courtyard, its grounds strewn with trash and the brick walls a canvas for a century of wear and tear. The team even found the remnants of an old outhouse tucked into a corner. As the San Francisco-based firm considered what to do with the 3,500-square-foot space, it hit on the idea of enclosing it to create a flexible, publicly accessible winter garden. “Once we saw it, we said this seems like an opportunity to do something cool and multi-functional,” Joo says.

To transform the courtyard, Cavagnero embarked on a sensitive restoration that made it usable without sandblasting away its past. Decades of ad-hoc additions and grime were tactfully removed from the brick to ensure it retained a level of authenticity and wasn’t too clean. There is gradation in brick colors, for instance, and layers of use are still visible, a physical reminder that this place has stood for 140 years. “We wanted to try and show the progression the brick walls went through,” Joo says. “We thought it would be more interesting than trying to get everything to look uniform like maybe it did back in the 1880s.”

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Before and after views of the once-dilapidated courtyard. Photos courtesy Mark Cavagnero Associates (1), © Donal Murphy (2)

That lived-in quality frames the adaptive reuse project that opened in February 2024. A stage-like platform was built at the north end of the courtyard, while circulation points were created on the western portion of the space to connect with new retail and dining spaces. The east side, which is attached to the existing Salesforce campus, has doorways leading to an employee lounge and lobby. Planters ring the perimeter of the newly created winter garden, which is enclosed with a slanted glass roof that floods the space with daylight. Baffles reduce glare and help minimize sonic reverberations.

A stage with bleacher steps flanks the northern end of the courtyard. Photo © Donal Murphy

But more than valuable gathering space, the winter garden also showcases Cavagnero’s clever knitting together of what Joo calls a “funky” building. Two stacked bridges, on the second and third floors, located at the southern end of the courtyard connect the hotel’s east and west wings, which are offset by a half-floor discrepancy in their heights. A third bridge links the hotel to a new steel-and-glass building on the Salesforce campus. And a compact elevator replaces the courtyard outhouse to ensure that all floors are wheelchair accessible. “In order to make the transition work, we had to find an elevator that had doors on perpendicular sides, so one on the west side and one on the north side,” Joo says. “In terms of the entry, I've actually never seen that before.”

The ingenuity on display in the transformed courtyard is a microcosm of the effort required throughout the project. The firm was committed to not disguising its work or making anything feel “faux-historic,” Joo says. That meant retaining as much of the original building as possible—and getting creative when it couldn’t. The mosaic tile floor in the main lobby, for instance, was in poor condition, pocked with holes and chunks chipped away. Rather than tearing it up and starting over, Cavagnero hired a conservation consultant, salvaged and cleaned as many original tiles as possible, incorporated them into landings on the central stone staircase that used the same material, then reconstructed the lobby floor with tiles that closely matched the original.

The winter garden offers direct access to an employee lounge and lobby. Photo © Donal Murphy

“We saw that the building had really nice bones, and once you remove some of the surface damage you can see that there’s a lot of potential here,” Joo says. And bridging it all—literally and figuratively—is the winter garden. “When we stood in the courtyard, that was the aha moment.”