102 el cortez

April 26, 2013 by dbrds

Mavrix Equity Vice President & Co-founder Erin Wicomb came to DBRDS in 2011 with an opportunity to help him redesign a 1,000sqft+, 1 bedroom, 2 bathroom New York style loft that he had recently purchased in the Historic El Cortez building of downtown San Diego. The existing space was rather bare & predictable. The original beige kitchen cabinetry remained with the dated white appliance package. Oversized air conditioning ducts running through the space with no consideration of placement, while a highlight […]

Categories: design, photography • Tags: California, Darren Bradley, DBRDS, Design, Downtown San Diego, Equity, Erin Wicomb, Historic El Cortez, Loft, Mavrix, New York Style Loft, San Diego, Space

idea: reclaim balboa 2015

April 12, 2013 by dbrds

Over the past 12 months I have invited a solid group of local designers into the DBRDS office for random Friday afternoon design dialogs. For full disclosure, I often entice this group of very busy designers into the our studio by offering a ‘tasting of sorts’, sometimes with beer, other times with whiskey, & so on. Either way, my intent is always to spark an interesting dialog for ideas in San Diego. What generally happens is we all get fired […]

Categories: design • Tags: Balboa Park, Balboa Stadium, Craig Howard, David McCullough, DBRDS, Design, El Prado, Howard Blackson, James Brown, Master Plan, Plaza de Panama, San Diego, TEDxAFC, United States, UrbDeZine, Vicki Estrada

503 el cortez

March 27, 2013 by dbrds

Sasha Favelukis (Partner of Sequoian Hard Money Lenders) came to DBRDS in late 2012 with a project in the Historic El Cortez building in downtown San Diego. Sasha had recently purchased a 600+sqft 1 bedroom + 1 bathroom condominium located on the north-west corner of the building on the 5th floor. With fantastic views across downtown towards the San Diego bay & an overwhelming ‘beige on beige’ existing color scheme we set about measuring the space for the redesign – […]

Categories: construction, design, furniture, photography • Tags: 503, Bing Crosby, Darren Bradley, DBRDS, Design, Downtown San Diego, Dwight D. Eisenhower, El Cortez, Elvis Presley, Gerald Ford, Heather Eves, Hold It Home, interior, Ivan Rimanic, Lyndon B. Johnson, modern, Pacific Design & Construction, Pacific Drapery, Pauly De Bartolo, San Diego, Sasha Favelukis, Sequoian, Urban Lighting

Reading between the lines

December 4, 2012 by dbrds

Like most designers, I spend a little time each day surfing the web for architectural  inspiration. Sometimes it’s project specific in search of an idea, or a project I once came across, sometimes I just search for new projects noticing trends in the industry, or new products & materials. Instinctively though, even without meaning to, I find myself just flicking from one architect’s website to another’s, bouncing from design websites like DEZEEN or Archdaily,…all of which fulfill my daily hit […]

Categories: construction, design, photography • Tags: Archdaily, Architecture, Chapel, Concrete, DBRDS, Design, Metal

furniture: the toledo drafting stool

July 9, 2012 by dbrds

too cool for drafting school.  

Categories: design, furniture • Tags: DBRDS, Design, furniture, industrial, toledo drafting stool

Orchids, Onions & Opportunities

June 12, 2012 by dbrds

Categories: design, media • Tags: DBRDS, Design, Leslee Schaffer, Onions, Opportunities, Orchids, San Diego, San Diego Architectural Foundation

20120519 Friends of San Diego Architecture talk on DENSITY by Howard Blackson

May 20, 2012 by dbrds

Categories: design • Tags: Density, Design, Friends of San Diego Architecture, Howard Blackson, NEW SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN, Placemakers, San Diego, Urban Planning

use public transportation

February 9, 2012 by dbrds

Hell yes…this is a cool stamp we received today in the mail. Awesome to see especially as Ivan caught the trolley this morning to get a meeting!

Categories: design • Tags: Design, public transportation, San Diego MTS, stamps, trolley

rethinking the SART

September 6, 2011 by dbrds

Last year, we decided that amongst our paying projects, we wanted to challenge ourselves to find creative solutions to large scale urban sites around California. One of these was inspired by a trip Ivan took to the Santa Anita Racetrack in Arcadia, CA. We created ourselves the simple brief of ‘if the racetrack needed to be re-master planned – what would we do?’…and started off with some very conceptual massing design sketches. The main topic of this session was to challenge ourselves […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: Arcadia, Design, Golden Gate Park, Los Angeles, Master Plan, Race track, Recreation, Shopping mall, Urban and Regional Planning

Hitech Interior Competition

July 11, 2011 by dbrds

In December 2010, DBRDS was invited by Lorena Gaxiola, President of KUATRO DESIGN to be part of the design team for a new competition which they had been invited for. The competition is to design an interior concept for a nine storey Government office building which is already under construction in Nanjing, China. One thing we learnt previously about the Chinese is that they move fast when it comes to building! The competition period was only six weeks, which meant that we needed to design a concept for over […]

Categories: design • Tags: Business, DBRDS, Design, Interior design, Kuatro Design, Lorena Gaxiola, Nanjing, Office