Neighborhood Guide: Mission Hills

Just south of Lake Hodges near 4S Ranch and Poway, Rancho Bernardo is a suburban community that blends residential neighborhoods with industrial pockets, elevated by a decidedly diverse food scene.  

Over 60 years ago, this North County neighborhood was once part of a family ranch. Since that time, big tech companies have taken up residence here, including Amazon, Sony Electronics, Oura Ring, HP, Teradata, and ASML. Rancho Bernardo Inn serves as a community hub, with locals frequently meeting at the hotel’s restaurants, golf course, and spa.  

Whether it’s work or a round of golf that brings you to Rancho Bernardo, we’ve taken care of the agenda planning with our guide to the area’s best restaurants, activities, and shops.

Rancho Bernardo Restaurants, Bars, and Coffee Shops

Avant

Sample ingredients plucked straight from Rancho Bernardo Inn’s onsite garden and served at their signature restaurant Avant. One of the neighborhood’s most upscale dining options, they serve a French-inspired menu with nods to California, including many seafood options. Don’t miss their more casual sister restaurant Veranda for al fresco dining.

17550 Bernardo Oaks Drive

The Kitchen at Bernardo Winery

Wood-fired pizzas and handmade pastas are standouts at The Kitchen, Bernardo Winery’s counter-service restaurant specializing in Sicilian flavors. Charcuterie boards and bruschetta make for great starters or snacks while wine tasting.

13330 Paseo Del Verano Norte

Bushfire Kitchen

Fast-casual and family-owned eatery Bushfire Kitchen recently opened a location in Rancho Bernardo, serving sandwiches, bowls, salads, burgers, protein plates, and housemade empanadas. Bushfire prepares comfort food with healthy ingredients, and offers plenty of vegetarian and vegan options.

11962 Bernardo Plaza Drive, Suite 110

The Cork & Craft

Some might call The Cork & Craft an overachiever. This gastropub has an in-house craft brewery and winery: Abnormal Beer and Wine. The more, the merrier. Their sushi menu is definitely worth exploring, but don’t miss other specialties like garlic noodles, chicken wings, and pork belly.

16990 Via Tazon

Carvers Steaks & Chops

You don’t have to leave Rancho Bernardo to get a white tablecloth steakhouse experience. Carvers Steaks & Chops has prime rib (their best seller), filet, ribeye, porterhouse, New York strip, and other cuts, served alongside crab-stuffed mushrooms, wedge salad, French onion soup, potato skins, and other steakhouse specialties.

1940 Bernardo Plaza Drive

Burma Place

This no-frills Burmese restaurant is known for its traditional tea leaf salad that’s topped with sesame and sunflower seeds, garlic chips, peanuts, tomatoes, jalapeños, fried yellow beans, and fermented green tea leaf dressing. Tucked into a nondescript strip mall, Burma Place is a great takeout option when you want to eat garlic noodles, fried rice, chicken curry, and samosas from the comfort of your couch.

16719 Bernardo Center Drive, Suite A

Phở Ca Dao

Find authentic Vietnamese cuisine at Phở Ca Dao, including favorites like phở noodle soup, vermicelli noodles, broken rice dishes, and spring rolls. One of eight locations throughout San Diego, this family-owned chain uses robot servers for food delivery.

11808 Rancho Bernardo Road, Suite 100

The Kebab Shop

It’s all about the sauce at fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant The Kebab Shop. Smothering your chicken shawarma, gyro, or falafels in garlic yogurt, cilantro jalapeno, fire chili, and dill yogurt sauce is practically a rite of passage. The hardest part is deciding whether to order a wrap, bowl, or salad.

11980 Bernardo Plaza Drive

Casa Lahori

Get a taste of South Asian flavors at Casa Lahori, a Pakistani restaurant noted for its grilled meat kabobs. Other best-selling dishes include beef nihari, chicken biryani, and shahi paneer— best enjoyed with naan bread.

11975 Bernardo Plaza Drive

Kangnam Korean BBQ

Grill your own meat on the tabletop at Kangnam Korean BBQ, an interactive, all-you-can-eat experience that’s well-suited for large groups. Marinated beef bulgogi, grilled galbi short ribs, and spicy pork are served alongside traditional banchan dishes like kimchi, japchae glass noodles, and flavorful stews. Weekday lunch specials provide a nice discount on these filling meals.

11828 Rancho Bernardo Road, Suite 117–119

Curry & More Indian Bistro

Dig in to your favorite curries and kebabs at Curry & More Indian Bistro. Most entrees are served with a choice of two side dishes, including basmati rice, potatoes with cumin, daal, naan, or mixed greens. Help offset the spice with one of their sweet mango or strawberry lassi drinks.

11808 Rancho Bernardo Road, Suite 123

Sushi Kami

Craftsmans and Spanish Revivalists and mid-century modernists—why does San Diego have so many different architectural styles? What makes a home distinctly San Diego? What are the trends shaping the look of the city’s neighborhoods for years to come? We asked the experts: architects and designers honoring the past, crafting the present, and radically altering the future of San Diego living. They opened their portfolios, shared points of view, and treated us to snapshots of their latest work that speaks to the ideas they’re playing with. The result? Six trends, design choices, and a proposal to make local homes unique. Grab a lemonade and get a little inspo for your own place.

Trend 1: Taming the Wild

Outdoor comfort goes to 11 with climate-controlled architecture

“Clients are now reaching for comfortable outdoor spaces that can be controlled for subtle shifts in the environment—heated covered porches, or patios with controlled louvered ceilings with integrated fans, lighting, heaters, and adjustable light.” –Mark Morris, Oasis Architecture & Design

“I think outdoor spaces in San Diego can be as useful or even more useful than indoor spaces. Relating to the site, view, [and] neighborhood can bring so much value and richness to a home.” –Bill Bocken, Bill Bocken Architecture & Interior Design

Trend 2: End of the Farmhouse Era, Finally

The death of Little House on the Coast and the rise of warmth and organic materials

“After years of modern farmhouses—black windows, white houses, and gray walls and floors—natural tones are coming back. We are seeing a return to organic textures and more saturated color. Homes feel layered rather than stark.” –Susan Wintersteen, Savvy Interiors

“There’s a move toward homes that feel like every element has a purpose. I see a strong desire for warmth and natural stone, wood, organic textures with softer transitions, and materials that age well.” –Jen Pinto, Jackson Design & Remodeling

Trend 3: Respect Your Elders

Designers’ plea: Don’t ditch beautiful bones for trend whimsy

“I would like to see even more architectural integrity, fewer quick flips, and more thoughtful renovations that respect proportion, scale, and context. San Diego deserves homes that feel timeless, not transactional.” –Susan Wintersteen, Savvy Interiors

“We want to see people respecting the original character of their homes while re-imagining them for modern life, rather than erasing character in favor of quick transformations that look ‘cookie-cutter.’” –John Kavan, Jackson Design & Remodeling

Trend 4: We’re Designing to Stay Awhile

San Diego’s design market is maturing in place

“Homeowners are staying in their homes longer—some 15 or 20 years. That has shifted design away from trend-driven choices and toward architecturally driven spaces that are functional, cohesive, timeless, and designed to support daily life over decades.” –Jen Pinto, Jackson Design & Remodeling

Trend 5: This Is Not Spicoli’s House

We probably don’t need a starfish next to our “Beach That Way” sign

“There’s a noticeable move away from literal ‘coastal themes’ and toward more layered, textural environments. San Diego homes today often feel cleaner, more architectural, and more personal.” –Julie Crosby, designer

“Today, the aesthetic is more refined but still rooted in ease. It is coastal without being cliché and modern without being cold. The throughline is light, air, and a relaxed sophistication that reflects how people actually live here.” –Susan Wintersteen, Savvy Interiors

Trend 6: The House Outside Your House

Outdoor square footage as equally valuable as interior space

“When you can live outdoors most of the year, architecture and interiors must support that. Large format doors, layered patios, durable materials, and seamless flooring transitions all stem from lifestyle.” –Susan Wintersteen, Savvy Interiors

“Nearly everyone wants to take advantage of the constant sunshine, so we see a huge desire for indoor-outdoor living, light and airy fabrics, organic materials that bring the feeling of nature into the home, and a desire to incorporate a relaxed, coastal lifestyle into everyday living.” –Lilli Fish, LS Design Studio

San Diego’s most iconic architectural tower sat closed and vacant for over 80 years until the invisible architects came in.

A century ago, the dramatic structure we now know as the California Building greeted visitors to the 1915–16 Panama–California Exposition in Balboa Park. It was covered in ornate pilasters, colorful tiles shone on its domed roof, and an attached eight-story tower surveyed the expo below. The building resembled a church, yet attendees who stepped inside expecting a sermon instead encountered an exhibit called The Story of Man Through the Ages. The showcase would inspire the building’s longtime-permanent use as the Museum of Us (formerly the Museum of Man).

Its tower became famous but furtive. Shut to the public in 1935, it spent decades as an instantly recognizable but inaccessible landmark. Finally, the museum decided that the California Tower would reopen for tours by 2015 and be outfitted for earthquake safety by 2020.

The challenge was significant. In order to keep it secure during seismic shifts, the whole structure needed steel braces, concrete walls, and tension rods—major infrastructure that had to remain a secret; hidden so that it didn’t alter the tower’s legendary look.

The people who completed the work were secret, too. Sort of.

“We call ourselves ‘invisible architects,’” says David Marshall, principal architect at Heritage Architecture & Planning, the firm tasked with restoring the California Tower. “Most architects going through school, their dream is to create something that’s never been created before. That’s not what preservation architects do. We are following the footsteps of great designers, and we don’t want to leave our fingerprints on everything we work on.”

Marshall has spent the last 35 years returning iconic San Diego structures to their original shine: Balboa Theatre, the Top Gun house, Hotel del Coronado, and the Western Metal Supply Co. building, to name a few. And those are just the well-known ones. San Diego has more than 1,000 buildings—from modest homes to multi-story civic structures—that qualify as historic for various reasons.

“Number one is age: It has to be over 30 years old,” says Cathy Herrick, who founded the development company San Diego Historic Properties with her father Leon in 1984. (Though that’s not a hard-and-fast rule—Marshall’s team was able to help top local architect Jonathan Segal designate three of his buildings constructed after 2000, since any structure proven to be architecturally significant is up for consideration.)

“Second, it has to have enough of its original fabric—like 90 percent,” Herrick continues. The preservationist’s ultimate goal is to gently repair and, if absolutely necessary, replace weakened or damaged portions of the building while making modern safety and accessibility upgrades.

Marshall and his team completed a $160 million renovation at the Hotel del Coronado last year, and even seemingly minor details required some creative problem-solving.

“We were trying to bring back the historic handrails around the front porch,” he explains. “They were built in 1888, so they didn’t meet the current code—they were only 29 inches tall instead of 42 inches tall.” On top of their diminutive stature, the handrails had seven-inch gaps between their pickets, more than twice the current safety requirement of less than four inches. The Heritage Architecture team’s solution: build exact replicas of the original handrails, but add a frameless glass rail behind them that’s only visible up close.

At The Beau—Herrick’s $5 million restoration of an 1886 Gaslamp Quarter hotel said to have been a favorite haunt of Al Capone—“there was a section of redwood staircase banisters and posts that were deteriorated,” Herrick says. “We took the pieces that remained and sent them to Northern California to a guy who specializes in hand-tilling [creating a distressed appearance on the redwood]. He made new pieces to match the historic.”

Restoring an old building for a new purpose—which preservation architects call adaptive reuse—can become even trickier. “Standard number one is to find a new use that’s compatible with the historic use,” like turning an old hotel into apartments, Marshall says.

His team transformed the Western Metal Supply Co. building at Petco Park into suites and a team store for Padres fans. “Warehouses like that are the easiest to convert because they’re usually large, open spaces with very few columns and partitions,” he explains. Any additions can be torn out by future preservationists, returning the building to its original state.

All these efforts to preserve the past don’t come cheap. “At The Beau Hotel, we wanted to put back the original 140-year-old bay windows. There were only eight of them, but it would have cost me $750,000,” Herrick says. “You sometimes have to make the economic decision to go with something that looks like the original but really is new.”

Another challenge is that skilled artisans capable of restoring and replicating historical designs and materials are becoming increasingly rare. Over her four-decade career, Herrick utilized craftspeople—some in their 80s—who specialize in unique skills like repointing historic brick or reworking century-old window sashes. “Those guys aren’t around anymore,” she says. “It’s a lost art.”

Historical preservation may also be under threat from a policy perspective. As of now, the City of San Diego automatically reviews any building that’s over 45 years old before it’s demolished or its exterior is altered. But with the city’s current focus on densification and increased housing, Marshall says, “there seems to be a lot of push for fewer restrictions on new construction in historic neighborhoods.”

A proposed amendment to the current Heritage Preservation program would alter that automatic review process because it is “a reactive and, overall, less efficient approach to historic preservation,” says Kelley Stanco, deputy director of Climate, Preservation & Public Spaces for the City Planning Department. “Of the roughly 3,500 properties reviewed every year, 85 to 90 percent are found to have no potential historic significance. In addition to creating unnecessary delays for project applicants, it is an ineffective use of city resources that could be more effectively spent proactively surveying and identifying what is significant and bringing those properties forward for designation.”

Another suggested amendment would give the Historical Resources Board new recourse for overturning historical designations. “If a building owner wants to tear down these newly designated historic houses, they’re gonna go to the council and appeal and, depending if they have any leverage—financially or otherwise—the council could say, ‘It’s not historic anymore,’” Marshall says. He fears that the change would “open the door to nothing being able to stay designated historic and nothing being safe from demolition.”

Stanco argues that changes to the city’s Heritage Preservation program are intended “not to eliminate historic preservation, but rather to incorporate…other important factors” like housing, equity, and sustainability.

The Save Our Heritage Organization (SOHO), a nonprofit dedicated to preserving historical architecture in San Diego, recently sent a letter, signed by former members and staff of the San Diego Historical Resources Board, to Mayor Todd Gloria and the city council decrying delays in historic designation reviews and nominations, among other concerns.

Ultimately, “growth and preservation are compatible,” believes SOHO Executive Director Bruce Coons. “The fact of the matter is that even if all the eligible houses and buildings were designated, it would be one percent or less of the city’s entire housing stock.”

Coons considers many historic properties “naturally occurring affordable housing”: They already exist, for one, giving them a financial leg-up on costly new builds. They’re also typically smaller than contemporary homes, and San Diego’s Mills Act financially incentivizes homeowners to maintain their historic houses through property tax relief. A number of structures in older San Diego neighborhoods also added ADUs during the first and second World Wars, contributing to density.

And beyond the practical, these structures contribute an inimitable texture to the local landscape. San Diego is unique for its mix of architectural styles—the famous Spanish Revival buildings, of course, but also Victorian, Pueblo-style, Art Deco, Craftsman, ranch-style, and midcentury-modern structures, spread across popular neighborhoods like Hillcrest, Bankers Hill, North Park, Point Loma, La Jolla, Logan Heights, and more.

“Our built environment is really what makes San Diego what it is,” Coons says. “It’s difficult to get meaning from a stucco box. I think San Diegans want to feel like San Diegans, and [historical buildings] provide that context, meaning, depth, and character to our lives. We realize that when they’re gone.”

Surrounded by eucalyptus and olive trees at the end of a cul-de-sac is a friendly take on a typically hard-edged style—a midcentury modern home softened by gabled roofs and judicious use of wood and brick, elements more typical of early-20th-century Craftsman houses. It was designed by a physician and his wife, the Stevensons, who raised five children there.

Ross Markowitz and Jose Letayf lived a few blocks away in a Spanish Colonial house and had admired the place for years. They bought it in 2019, after the original owners passed away. “We wanted a single-story place,” Markowitz says. “It’s a house where we want to grow old, so it had to be simple and easy to maintain.”

“The appeal is the privacy and the midcentury architecture, which is rare to find in Mission Hills,” Letayf adds.

They met with several architects before they connected with Taal Safdie and Ricardo Rabines of Mission Hills–based firm Safdie Rabines Architects. The firm is prolific, with projects ranging from the redevelopment of the San Diego Sports Arena site to a student neighborhood at the University of California San Diego, along with several custom homes.

“There are some really great bones to the house, but it needed a lot of organization to make it more open and inviting,” Safdie says. “The ways [Markowitz and Letayf] live informed how we took the existing structure and made it their home.” The couple needed a place that felt cozy and convenient for gatherings and visits from friends and grandchildren. The basic layout remains unchanged: Two central spaces—one for living and dining and the other a combined kitchen and family room—flanked by a primary suite on one end of the house and guest rooms on the other.

Markowitz and Letayf were more involved in the design than most clients. In Los Angeles, Markowitz has renovated dozens of homes, many of them modern. His first and favorite was designed by the firm Buff and Hensman as part of the Case Study Houses program that produced many innovative midcentury homes in Los Angeles. Letayf has an eye for interior design, and they are both collectors of international art. Safdie, Rabines, and project architect Matthew Paola brought all of these elements together and added plenty of architectural finesse.

Original entry doors, painted teal, lead to an open interior of spaces that flow from one to another, tied together by new terrazzo floors. In the foyer is a round, recessed ceiling light of hand-blown glass, chrome, and silk, designed by New Yorker Denis Collura, and a pair of small, twisty tables the couple found in France, painted in far-out patterns and outfitted with gold-booted feet.

The living room has its original gabled, knotty pine ceiling, but expansive new glass windows and doors take in views of the landscape: mature trees, cactus and succulents, and sweeping views beyond Mission Valley, from the blue-domed cathedral at the University of San Diego to the tower at SeaWorld.

Along one living room wall is An Explanation of Love by Dorina Mocan, a six-panel painting that Markowitz and Letayf found in Hong Kong. Inspired by a Shakespeare sonnet, it presents six characters who represent aspects of love, such as envy, betrayal, and lust. Most of the furniture came from the couple’s previous house. In the living room are a burnt-orange Kravet sofa, a custom midnight blue scoop-arm chaise, four bison-white leather armchairs, and a cocktail table of dark imbuia wood with bronze legs.

In the kitchen, new 18-foot-wide glass doors fold out of sight to merge the kitchen and family area with the landscape and pool. The team knocked out the kitchen’s original low ceiling and replaced it with a pine-beamed ceiling matching the one in the living room. Custom Italian cabinets here and in other rooms are from Boffi|DePadova in La Jolla.

Markowitz and Letayf’s primary suite combines the original primary bedroom and a second bedroom. Through a frameless corner window peek green and gray textures of eucalyptus. On the wall above the bed are Markowitz’s closeup photos of the couple’s eyes that he took as part of an ongoing art project.

Beyond a wide pocket door, in the master bath, a freestanding tub faces another new corner window with similar green views. A long vanity and bank of mirrored medicine cabinets seem to float, thanks to concealed LED strips. One mirrored door hides a built-in flat-screen TV. In the closet, Italian cabinets and a glass display table contain designer clothes, shoes, and neatly arranged eyeglasses and coiled belts.

The new guest wing is a lovely, private place for grandchildren or friends. The updated bathrooms are sleek and modern, with distinctive materials such as a crushed abalone backsplash and solid wood doors on heavy, stainless-steel hinges. Guests also have their own small kitchen, which doubles as a workspace for caterers.

Set back from the street, the home is barely visible beyond a broad landscape of cacti, agave, and succulents designed by LA–based Studio John Sharp. The plants grow in beds defined by paths of red gravel and gray decomposed granite.

“The house hadn’t had any kind of landscape plan when we took on the project,” says Sharp, who, like Markowitz, has worked on several Los Angeles homes by prominent architects. “It’s such a cool midcentury piece that we wanted to create a landscape that fit with it and told a story of its own. Our goal was to update the landscape so the guys could experience it from outside and inside.”

Sharp’s plan includes new pathways around the house. “I wanted to create a complete landscape journey through a series of botanical surprises,” he explains. Taking on different moods and colors through the seasons, his work mixes drought-tolerant and native plants with others that are special to Markowitz and Letayf, such as tropical frangipani found in Hawaii, one of their favorite vacation spots.

The back of the lot slopes down steeply all the way to Hotel Circle. The site is large enough that neighboring houses are far away, so the vibe is quiet, private, pastoral.

At 4,000 square feet, the home is large, but it’s no McMansion. It feels intimate inside and out. Thanks to all the new glass, it merges with views and light that change through the seasons and from sunrise to sunset. On the back edge of the property, Sharp replaced the original pergola with a sunken seating pit bordered by mission cobblestones. It’s a peaceful place to hang with a few friends or to sit alone listening to the wind, watching the birds, and taking in the sunset as the lights come alive in Mission Valley and beyond.

Mission Hills may be only a few miles from downtown San Diego, but it’s nearer to nature than often meets the eye. Matthew and April Segal and their children Oliver and Eleanor got up close with wildlife when they made their move north from Little Italy to their new concrete-and-glass home, designed by Matthew, at the edge of a Mission Hills canyon. One of their first visitors was a raccoon who wandered in through a sliding glass door, leaving the pantry in disarray.

In Little Italy, the family lived in a large townhome tucked into one corner of The Continental, an eight-story, mixed-use building designed by Matthew and his father Jonathan Segal, both of them award-winning architects. Little Italy is great for nightlife, but with their two young ones, the couple began wanting something different.

“We were ready to graduate from living in the city to a more suburban lifestyle,” Matthew says. He and April scoped out several sites before they settled on one in this quiet neighborhood, with views into the canyon where lizards, snakes, coyotes, and squirrels run amok through a native landscape of chaparral, sage, lemonade berry, and manzanita.

Matthew is drawn to difficult sites such as this steep “flag” lot behind an older modern home. His plan consists of a narrow walkway and driveway (the “flagpole”) leading past the existing home to their new place on the land below (the “flag”). Hugging the hillside, the residence is invisible from the street.

“The important thing is the property came with a development permit that had worn out the previous owners,” Matthew says. “They had angry neighbors, and the city has a difficult construction permitting process.” After several design iterations and many visits to the city permitting office, Matthew convinced them of what seems pretty obvious: With a bottom level tucked into the hillside, the height and scale of his three-story scheme are well within city codes.

Unlike architects who focus mostly on design, Matthew prefers an integrated process where he leads a team of specialists he has brought together over the course of several projects. “I serve as architect first and foremost,” he says, but his cadre of engineers, concrete and glass specialists, carpenters, craftsmen, electricians, plumbers, and artists speeds the design and construction process.

They completed this home in 11 months. Matthew’s design earned a 2024 Honor Award, the highest recognition, from the American Institute of Architects, San Diego. You can sense its modernist DNA, from Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Southern California’s post-war Case Study Houses to the countless concrete buildings Matthew visited in Italy and France during architecture school at the University of Southern California.

Concrete steps lead down from the driveway and around the corner of the home to a forecourt that stretches across the back of the main living area on the middle floor. On warm afternoons, the family leaves the glass sliding doors wide open, merging the open-air forecourt and adjacent main living area into a capacious indoor-outdoor room. Italian porcelain tile floors inside and out add to the flow of continuous space.

A long kitchen and island are at the heart of the open interior, which stretches from one side of the home to the other. To the left is the kids’ play area. To the right, the family and dining space. Exposed 12-inch-thick concrete walls cap each side of the home. Ceiling-height walnut cabinets form the kitchen’s back wall, concealing countless items that clutter most of our homes.

Veiny, leather-finish Taj Mahal quartzite (a brand, not an antiquity, and not leather) covers the island. Matthew designed the steel-and-glass dining table. Furniture in the adjacent sitting area includes mid-century Barcelona chairs by Mies van der Rohe and a Florence Knoll sofa.

A recess between the kitchen and dining areas conceals an elevator connecting all three levels. On the other side of the kitchen, steps drop to the lower level, which houses the primary suite and kids’ bedrooms.

“I wanted our room to be close to the kids’ rooms,” April says. Oliver and Eleanor’s bedrooms and bath are only a “Hey, what’s up?” from the primary suite. The couple’s bedroom and adjacent bath are enclosed by a wall of glass. From the bedroom, a sliding glass door opens to a concrete patio and built-in spa. The bathroom has a spacious glass shower and freestanding tub. Canyon views come at you from every angle.

The top level has canyon vistas of its own, but from a bird’s-eye perspective. There, you’ll find the garage, the guest room, and a compact office with engineered walnut floors, a vintage rosewood desk for Matthew, and a table for April’s craft projects. Furniture in the office includes Eames and Aeron chairs and a Herman Miller clock. Two drawings by Matthew’s sister, artist Austen Segal, are among the art.

But with trees surrounding the home and vegetation throughout the neighborhood, Matthew says fire has been on his mind since the time they purchased the lot.

“It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when,” he says. However, he believes that the home’s thick concrete walls and fire-resistant glass panels—with inert gas sandwiched within to diffuse heat transfer—give the structure a good chance of surviving. “To a certain extent, I’d feel comfortable staying in the house during a fire.”

Not only is concrete vastly more durable than wood-frame-and-stucco, it’s energy-efficient due to its thermal mass, the way it stores and releases heat. Rooftop solar panels provide nearly 100 percent of the home’s electricity—even after the couple charges their car.

April still works in Little Italy, where she founded Remedy Holistic Pharmacy in a first-floor space at The Continental. Matthew shares an office with his dad in Barrio Logan, and they’ve collaborated on countless projects, with a focus on in-fill housing.

Mission Hills provides a perfect live-work balance. Oliver and Eleanor’s preschool is a short walk away, as are a neighborhood park, Mission Hills Nursery (the kids are fascinated with the business’s roaming chickens), restaurants, and a coffee shop.

Could this be their forever home?

“I think so, and I wouldn’t normally say this,” Matthew confesses. “We’re literally in the wilderness, but five minutes from downtown in a walkable location. At night, you hear the owls and see the coyotes. It’s a crazy feeling—I don’t know how you could ever replace it.”