Located on a substandard lot in San Francisco’s North Beach, Tower House is a new single family home that nods to Coit Tower, its neighbor on Telegraph Hill. At half the width and depth of a typical San Francisco lot, Tower House makes the most of its compact footprint and is not setback from its lot lines. Just as this home maximizes the allotted space in plan, it also maximizes is allotted height. The resulting home is a dense program stack that places the private spaces of the bedrooms on lower floors below the more public living and kitchen level. The top of the building is a fully occupiable roof deck that extends the living space to the outdoors. Overall proportions, floor heights, openings, and exterior cladding were carefully considered to accentuate the height and lend this small building a taller feel. A shift in scale of window openings from smaller below and larger above helps to disguise the true floor-to-floor heights as well as echo the change from inward to outward looking program spaces. Window locations were chosen to frame views of downtown to the south or create panoramic views of Russian Hill to the west.