Credit: architecturaldigest.com
For the San Francisco Decorator Showcase’s 46th edition, open April 26 through May 26, 19 interior and landscape design firms embarked on a visually stimulating endeavor to transform a five-level, 9,400-square-foot dwelling in the city’s iconic Pacific Heights area. Although this neighborhood is apropos for such a monumental display of design talent, this year’s showcase house itself didn’t begin as the grand manse it is today.
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In 1902, the property was conceived as a three-flat Tudor Revival, designed by architect Thomas Paterson Ross as a multi-family investment property for Carrie Gummer, whose husband, Charles, had been a successful banker before his untimely death. Through the 1930s, the building’s tenants included well-heeled bachelors and widows until it was sold to real estate entrepreneur Lyman Potter (who then moved into one of the units with his family and rented the others through the 1960s.)
Changing hands several more times over the ensuing decades, it was relatively recently that the home’s design identity completely shifted. By all outward appearances, not a semblance of Tudor styling remains following its 2009 transformation by architect Louis Felthouse and designer Matthew MacCaul Turner. The home’s English façade gave way to a classically-inspired French limestone exterior, but its interiors, now consolidated to form a single-family home, still reflected its Tudor past (though all these elements were now contemporary interpretations). Aside from owners, not much else has changed in the 16 years since the massive renovation, but the sky was the limit when the region’s top designers got the keys to the eight bedroom, seven full- and three half-bath home, with its multi-level rooftop terrace boasting staggering city and Bay views. Sandwiched between sizable single-family homes (including the Dutch Colonial Revival Newhall Mansion) and Edwardian and classic revival-style apartment buildings, the 123-year old structure is ready for its latest reveal.
However, it’s not the panoramic vistas or sightline across the water to Marin that are the most captivating parts of the San Francisco Decorator Showcase, which has raised more than $19 million for the San Francisco University High School’s financial aid program since 1977. It’s the newly imagined spaces that hold our attention and help to forecast incoming design trends, as interpreted by arbiters of style from around the Bay Area. In Geoffrey De Sousa’s reimagining of the wood-paneled living room, the designer foreshadows several of the major taste-making themes seen throughout the house. Beneath a large photograph by pioneering filmmaker and installation artist Sir Isaac Julien, a sumptuous curled-arm sofa in the softest blush pink is flanked by a pair of Todo Modo slipper chairs upholstered in green boucle. (The set was designed by French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte in 1993 for the Louvre—its moveable steel arms allow the bolster-back to move from one side to the other so patrons could comfortably view works on opposing walls without changing seats.)
