By Neal Wong

Shane Curnyn and Josh Lowe left the East Coast separately, chasing the same vision: a city dense enough to support an architecture practice and an ocean close enough to surf before work. Fifteen years after founding Juniper Architecture, the two principals run their firm in a former motorcycle repair shop on Balboa Street, blocks away from their favorite surf spot near the Cliff House.

Curnyn went to Yale University for undergraduate work and Harvard University for graduate school, completing his studies in 1998. Lowe entered Roger Williams University in Rhode Island the same year and finished a five-year program in 2003, a track that let him pursue licensure without graduate school.

“Josh ripped the Band-Aid off, and I slowly tortured myself,” Curnyn said.

Both came to architecture through fine art. Curnyn was drawing and painting in high school and found architecture listed in a course catalog in college.

“I was interested in taking a talent for the visual arts and applying that in a practical way,” Curnyn said. “That was the one avenue of design that was open to me, and I jumped at it. I loved it, and I just kept going with it.”

Lowe grew up around craftsmanship. His grandfather was a machinist for a large company in Delaware, and his father was a general contractor who built cabinetry and interiors. Lowe asked his grandfather about the field before college.

“He said, ‘I think you’ll enjoy applying an art where you have people that you’re servicing and you’re doing the work in unison with bigger teams and larger communities,’” Lowe said. “That was something I was a little bit scared about, but as I moved into college, I got really excited about it.”

Curnyn’s first job out of school was at a large firm, where he was assigned to conceptual work.

“It was such a big office where everybody was kind of specialized, and that became kind of my specialty,” Curnyn said. “It also meant that I wasn’t getting exposed to all the other layers of architecture, in terms of how you actually document every aspect of how a building is supposed to be built.”

He moved to an eight-person firm doing houses and small commercial projects, then joined a construction company as its in-house architect in San Francisco on a design-build team, where architect and general contractor work as one outfit. Lowe, who had worked at firms ranging from eight to 60 people and spent a year and a half doing construction in Delaware, came on board there. That is where they met.

“The thing about our experience doing design-build that was really a great value to us is that it gave us an insight into how builders work and how builders think,” Curnyn said. “We understand the mechanics of how the estimating process works and how running a job works, and that knowledge of construction really informs our work now as just architects.”

Clients drawn in by the design side were not always ready for the financial commitment the paired builder required, so the two began designing projects that would be built by someone else. They named the side venture after the alley behind their office.

“We felt that ‘back alley design’ didn’t quite have a ring to it, so we just chose the name Juniper,” Curnyn said.

Friends supplied the early work. Lowe said the volume of projects coming from people they knew made a stand-alone design office obvious.

“We had tons of friends doing great projects like Andytown Coffee and White Cap, the bar down the street, and friends wanting to remodel their houses, and we were excited to do that work,” Lowe said. “Some of them were builders themselves or were connected to people that wanted to build the work.”

Juniper designed three locations for Andytown, including a roasting facility. The coffee company was stretched thin financing the work, so the two sides struck a barter: design services in exchange for office space. The firm stayed about five years, worked out of garages during the pandemic, and has been on Balboa Street for a little over two years.

Curnyn said their generation’s timing made a two-person firm viable.

“We are the first generation of architects that is able to come out of school, start working and then start their own firm and be able to do all of the production work associated with architecture ourselves,” Curnyn said. “The generations above us would have to hire young people to do that work.”

They still remember the transition from physical drawings and hiring artists for pencil renderings to using computers for work. A 3D printer in the office keeps a part of that analog past, letting clients physically understand and compare an existing house against design options. It helps them communicate ideas better than renderings or floor plans.

“Floor plans are kind of like sheet music,” Curnyn said. “It isn’t the actual space itself. It’s sort of the diagrams that create it.”

What the partners share is an interest in how buildings are made, and in how they hold up. When Lowe studied abroad in Europe as a student, he was allured by the textures of stone buildings and steps aging through centuries. That idea of making something timeless shows up in their work today.

“We work in a modern design vocabulary to bring in an abundance of natural light and embrace expansive views,” Curnyn said. “Incorporating natural materials with grain, texture and patina brings a warmth to the spaces that folks sometimes find missing from modern architecture.”

It is also why wood keeps turning up in their models and their built work, standing in for the softness people often say modern houses lack. Curnyn said the influences on the firm are too many to list, though one California house comes up first for residential work: the Schindler House, Rudolph Schindler’s 1920s Los Angeles home of concrete and redwood, built around outdoor rooms.

Curnyn has lived in the Outer Sunset for 20 years, and Lowe lived there for a stretch before moving to Marin, which means the two are often designing on blocks they know by foot and by bike.

Lowe said the payoff is watching drawings turn into something a client can walk through.

“We’ve gotten to see the projects that we’ve designed come to life and get built and have an effect on our friends and our clients in a way that is real,” Lowe said. “Seeing it made, seeing it created and watching our work come to life is the inspiration for why we do what we do.”

Today at Juniper, drawing and design happen in the morning, coordination and phone calls in the afternoon and meetings get scheduled around high tide.

Juniper Architecture is located at 4039 Balboa St., near 42nd Avenue. Find more information at juniperarchitecture.com.