Vaulted roof and exposed beams still grace exterior spaces.

Silicon Valley tech companies can’s resist the ego-driven urge to outdo each other with bigger and bolder office structures. Facebook’s Frank Gehry campus in Menlo Park begat Apple’s neofuturistic Norman Foster UFO in Cupertino. LinkedIn’s Darth Vader-esque stump in San Francisco gave rise to the Pelli Clarke Pelli-designed Salesforce Tower a few blocks away. And so on.

So it’s refreshing when a startup takes the posturing down a notch, like Robinhood did in Menlo Park, choosing this circa-1951 Cliff May office space as its new headquarters.

But this isn’t just any midcentury stunner: Sunset Magazine, the West Coast’s foremost lifestyle publication, tapped May, the originator of California ranch-style architecture, to build their new headquarters (with adjoining test garden by Thomas Church), which has become the poetic ideal of office space. The iconic publication was the perfect fit for an iconic house.

Shortly before Time Inc. sold the property and ousted the magazine in 2014, Sunset Magazine detailed its decades-long home, saying: “The story starts in 1951, when Sunset moved from its San Francisco headquarters out to the Bay Area suburbs. The architect was Cliff May, a Los Angeles resident who built the space (his first commercial one) to look like a classic ranch-style home on 7 acres of property. Thomas Church landscaped the gardens (each one representing the different climates of the West) and Charlotte Hinckley helped design the interior (an ode to the “craftsmanship of the early Spanish-Californians”). Even after it was up and running, Sunset staffers operated the office much like what they preached in their magazine: designing, organizing, planting, and cooking.”