The Battery

San Francisco, CA

Salter started business 39 years ago in Musto Plaza, a former warehouse converted to office space. This 60,000 square foot historic building has been transformed into The Battery, a private club. The Battery is a collaborative event space, restaurant, bar, and hotel for Bay Area innovators. The Battery hosts live music events, ranging in style from deejays to opera, while preserving a quiet atmosphere in the library, spa, and guest rooms. After a full seismic retrofit, the basement houses a fitness center and a wine cellar/private dining room. The newly added fourth floor features a penthouse residence, including a guest suite with a roof-deck entertaining area complete with spa and herb garden. The first, second, and third floors were rebuilt as dining/lounge, banquet rooms/library/bar, and high-end hotel guest rooms, respectively.

The Battery is outfitted with the newest technology, including concealed video screens and mobile touchscreen room controls, while limiting technology use in certain areas to encourage social interaction. Detailed room acoustics design allows for high-fidelity listening in the penthouse suite and spontaneous music performances in the Musto Bar, with limited impact to the guest rooms separating these two spaces.

Salter provided the integrated design for acoustics, telecommunications, security, and audiovisual systems for this renovation. The telecommunications and security systems were delivered design-bid-build and we produced a basis-of-design for the audiovisual systems. Our design challenges included working with historic and upscale finishes, providing high-performance acoustical isolation between floors with seemingly incompatible uses, strict security protocols, high-bandwidth wired and wireless network design, and concealing all of the technology pathways in otherwise inaccessible ceilings. The Battery is an example of integrated system design, where Salter collaborated with the design and construction teams to artfully incorporate new technology elements into an adaptive re-use space that is quickly becoming a San Francisco institution.