Heather Hilliard

Our interview with Heather Hilliard continues:

JM: So you had come out here to the Academy of Art. How did you get in at The Wiseman Group? That seems like quite the coup.

HH: Well, that’s also a funny story because I really wanted to work for Martha Angus.

JM: Oh, really?

HH: Yes. I had just moved out here, and I think I saw her work at a showcase or something. I started looking at her site, and saw that she had moved from New York, and that she had an art background.

JM: Right.

2009 San Francisco Decorator Showcase House by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Carin Alpert.

HH: I contacted her firm and I was surprised she emailed me back.  She said, “No, I don’t have any space available, but, you know, you really should work at The Wiseman Group.” She said, “Call so-and-so there, Suzanna.” And I did, and I sent a résumé and everything and they just brought me in. I told them, “Well, I’m still in school, but I did work at this other firm in Philadelphia,” which they accepted. I started  as an intern, doing just about everything. As I continued, I got more responsibility, and then, after graduating, I became a full-time designer, growing from project manager, to designer, then to senior designer. It was great! Paul is an AD100 designer and is extremely talented. It was a fascinating experience and he was a great mentor.

I hope to someday have the level of projects that I worked on there. I’m sure everyone hopes for that.

Piedmont Home by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Michele Lee Willson

JM:Yes, it’s something very good to aspire to. You’ll get there.

HH: Well, it’s kind of like once you work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where do you go from there? It’s the third largest collection in the country. Similarly, once you work at The Wiseman Group, where do you go from there?

JM: Take over the world!

HH: We had amazing projects there. All of the clients wanted things that were just so custom to their house.  Everyone wanted something that’s different and uniquely beautiful. It was just a really great experience having no restrictions on budget and, sometimes, timeline. You could create work that was a living art installation.

JM: Times have changed a bit now, haven’t they?

HH: Oh yes.  Now that I’m on my own, my clients care about budget and timelines a lot. I’ve become adept at managing costs and timelines, which enables me to design custom pieces for all my assignments. That means I don’t accept budget jobs, but I can perform work for a wide range of mid-range to high-end clients who value custom design.

JM: What is the creative process like in interior design? If someone tells you, “I want something fabulous,” how do you translate that into an actual sofa?

HH: Since space is three-dimensional, I have to think about the space and how one experiences space… I took a class when I was at Drexel called Space and Time, and it was about 2D and 3D art, including performance and installation art – really using the space around you to create something. Having taken that kind of a class, as well as having had exposure to installation art and artists really helped me when I got to lead design projects. I’ve thought a lot about how we feel in a space. It’s hard to explain.

JM: I often wonder about what it’s like for design professionals to convey their directions to a builder, which come in 2D, and then to see those directions translated into 3D. It’s kind of a funny process. I mean, in some ways, it’s very linear.

2011 San Francisco Decorator Showcase Home by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Michelle Lee Willson.

HH: Right.

JM: But as a designer, do you kind of know beforehand what things are going to look like? Are there ever surprises?

HH: Some designers can just walk into a space and say they know exactly what it’s going look like, but I’m not that kind of designer. Maybe it’s because my training came in drafting – CAD and drawing – but I always feel like I have to look at a plan before I look at anything else. I work it out, and then, I can start to see it in three dimensions. We also use 3D programs to build quick 3D models.

But I’m always thinking about the proportions, the sightlines, the focal points – things that maybe some people don’t consider. Other folks might be thinking more about the decoration, but I’m trying to think of it as a whole, maybe more of the way an architect thinks about it.

Once I really focus in on the plan, and work it out in my head or in CAD – I do so much in CAD or just sketching – I can visualize it.

JM: So, you will sit at a computer drawing in CAD –

HH: Yes.

SHY Light by Bec Brittain. Interior design by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Michele Lee Willson

JM: Saying, “Okay, this is how big is this space? Where are the windows?” –

HH: And I think about the circulation and light and –

JM: – other rooms, and –

HH: Yes, what the adjacencies are and what you will  see if you’re looking from one room into the other room. I don’t know if that’s how most people think about it.

JM: Well, it doesn’t matter how other people do it. You have a successful business and you do it your way; that’s fine. I’m just curious abut how the process works, especially how you translate what a client tells you they want into what they actually get. For example, in the project where you just hung that chandelier, what did the client tell you that they wanted in that stairwell?

HH: They didn’t say they wanted anything. It was a spec house, so everything had Venetian plaster – the ceilings, all the walls, everything. It had those wagon wheel-style chandeliers.

JM: Oh, no.

HH: You know the kind. I guess it’s what the developer perceived a person living in Hillsborough would want to move into as a turn-key. When I see the mottled effect of poorly done Venetian plaster and wagon wheels hanging in entry halls, it scares me.

JM: Yes, that is frightening. That is very frightening.

Interiors by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Michele Lee Willson

HH:I wouldn’t have taken that project if I didn’t think the client was going to go along for the ride and could see something else in that house because I wouldn’t have been able to compromise that much.

JM: How did you think of that artist for that stairwell though? Have you been looking at her work for a while?

HH: Yes, I have been looking at her work. This stairwell is a 25-foot high space. It is the main entry hall, and it feels like a space with too much volume. There is nothing filling the space. The wagon wheel chandelier they did have was hanging kind of over the door, but off to the side a little bit. It was just floating in the most random place.

In that space, the focal point should really be in the area adjacent to the stairs. We needed something hanging above a big center table. That way we could fill the high, mid, and lower areas.

JM: Right.

Presidio Heights Dining Room by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Michele Lee Willson

HH: When people build houses these days, they build those enormous great rooms, like in McMansions. I know that families like to live that way these days, but –

JM: Do you think that people actually like to live that way though? I think that when you get into a room like that, it’s not a very pleasant experience. Those really tall entry halls bother me.

HH: Right, I know. That’s one of the ways I convinced the client. I said, “You know, there’s no human scale in this space. You have to bring something in to take up some of this volume to improve the proportions.” I showed her an elevation of what it would look like in the space. I took a photograph of the house with scaffolding as the painters were working, and I photo-shopped in a couple of light fixtures and said, “This is what it could look like that with table.” Sometimes clients can’t really understand in 2D what something will look like.

JM: SketchUp can be really handy for that, too.

HH: Exactly.

Interiors by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Caren Alpert

JM: A lot of our clients really can’t translate the 2D into the 3D. But you’ve had hundreds of experiences of doing that.

HH: Right, right.

JM: And builders have hundreds of experiences of doing that. We as professionals have a different kind of fluency with that language, but clients don’t have it.

HH: Right. I always have to stop myself and think, “Have they ever looked at a floor plan? Have they ever looked at an RCP (reflected ceiling plan) or an elevation?”

I try to be the kind of designer that really does listen to the client. I’m not style-driven. I appreciate it when clients come to me with different ideas of the way that they want to live or the way they see themselves using the spaces – their own aesthetic. I just try to bring out the best of what they want and help them to achieve it. Often people have an idea. They might have a couple of inspiration images, but they just really don’t know how to achieve it or if it’s appropriate. I try to take into consideration the way they want to live, the site, and the architectural style.

One time a client in Pacific Heights wanted to add a molding detail that was more common in a Victorian than in the kind of an Edwardian that she lived in. I thought, “It doesn’t seem appropriate. It’s going to seem like this applied ornament that shouldn’t be there.” I try to take all those things into consideration and try to help clients make the decision that seems appropriate for all of those reasons.

JM: So you help transform the request into something that can be done? Maybe there’s a little bit of extra ornament, but it’s not as much gingerbread, say, for example, that may be in a Victorian house.

HH: Right, or instead of putting the molding at that level with the curved ceiling, let’s just paint up to this level and then do something else above that. Or we can achieve it in a different way with lighting.

JM: What did you end up doing in the example that you just gave about the woman who wanted all the trim in her Edwardian house?

HH: I told her that what she was thinking about would probably be more appropriate in a Victorian house and I suggested, “Why don’t we just paint up to this line and then let’s let the ceiling kind of fade out to a slightly different shade?”

JM: Like an ombré effect.

HH: A little bit like ombré, yes.

Foam Etching by Zach M.

JM: To change subjects abruptly – have you always been interested in art?

HH: Well, my mom always insisted that we take tons of classes, so we did painting, drawing, cooking – a little bit of everything. We went fishing every summer. We went fly fishing in Canada.

JM: So, do you know how to fly fish?

HH: I did when I was younger – from about ten on.

JM: Wow.

HH: I skied like crazy. We played tennis. My mom wanted us to be in a lot of classes – swimming, gymnastics, you name it. It was a great way to get exposure to a lot of different things so I could figure out what I was drawn to. And I guess art was something I was really interested in.

Blue Installation, by Yves Klein

JM: Have you done a little bit of art yourself, too, then? You’re laughing!

HH: Yes, well, not really, but if you ask my husband, he would probably say, “Yes.”

JM: Your biggest fan. That’s very sweet.

HH: I sketch all the time, like ideas that I might have about furniture, or detailing on furniture. I did a showcase and I kept thinking I wanted to have something like Yves Klein blue in the space, but I couldn’t find a piece of art that had that Yves Klein blue.

JM: What is Yves Klein blue?

HH: It’s this really bright almost cobalt blue. It’s a very distinctive color. I was searching, and I thought, “Okay, I’ll get something from a gallery or I could go to the SF MOMA Artist Gallery and rent something for the space.” I couldn’t find anything and I happened to be in a consignment shop, and found some placements that were woven in Denmark, and they were Yves Klein blue. So, I took them to the framer – there was a huge set of them – and I said, “Let’s just float theses in a simple museum-like maple frame.” And so, that’s what’s hanging in my office.

Framed Blue Placemats by Heather Hilliard (in background of her office). Photography by Kathleen Harrison.

JM: Oh, I have to look at it now.

HH: I didn’t end up using it for the showcase because I found another piece of art in the interim while it was being framed, of course. My husband said, “I cannot believe you bought placemats at a consignment shop and had them framed all because of this color.” But that’s the kind of thing I do. I don’t think it’s really art, but I liked that they were woven and they had this handmade quality about them. The edges were a little uneven. I love to see the hand of the artist in the art, don’t you?

JM: Yes.

HH: The funny thing is, since I’ve hung that piece, a few people have walked by and asked if they could buy it. My husband is, of course, all too eager to sell it to anyone – the highest price offered. But I had to tell him, “You know, I actually just love it now. They aren’t placements anymore. They’re art. ” I know it’s ridiculous, but that was the color I was going for.

2010 Marin Decorator Showcase House Living Room by Heather Hilliard Design. Artwork by Amy Kaufman. Photography by Michelle Lee Willson

JM: So what painting did you end up using for the Showcase House?

HH: I chose something using Yves Klein Blue by Amy Kaufman. I think she’s from the East Bay, or she’s represented by an East Bay gallery. I actually rented that piece from SF MOMA Artists’ Gallery.

JM: You can rent paintings?

HH: You can rent them or buy them.

JM: At SF MOMA?

HH: Yes, and I’m assuming they probably don’t make a profit from it because they’re promoting emerging artists and mid-level career artists.

JM: That’s very cool. Speaking of galleries, you have to tell me about Art Basel, Miami Beach.

HH: I can send you a link to my favorite piece.

JM: Okay, cool!

HH: The gallery is called The Carpenter’s Workshop and it was part of Design Miami, which was in a separate pavilion. The convention center is full of international art galleries, but that’s really where the blue chip galleries show. That’s always a big deal, but now there are all of these little pavilions that are running shows concurrently, focused on more mid-career or emerging artists. That seems to be where a lot of the curators from museums and gallery owners go to try to find “the next one.” Design Miami has a lot of the same kind of galleries that you would have seen at SF20 if you went to that.

JM: Right.

You Fade to Light, 2009, by Random International

HH: I saw a big illuminated mirrored piece that had little two-inch square mirrors with motion detectors and LEDs, so when you walked in front of it or moved your hand, it moved with you. It was such an amazing piece!

JM: Wow!

HH: I loved that it responds to the person or movement in front of it.

JM: I was at Bradley International Airport in Connecticut and I saw an ad for Traveler’s Insurance, which I will never forget. There was a projection of a five-foot red umbrella. As people walked past it, somehow, the image of the umbrella would burst into a million little umbrellas. Then they would slowly reassemble. Stanley, my son, and I spent a good 15 minutes in front of it. It was so cool and I couldn’t figure out how they were doing that – it was just a projected image.

HH: Right. It can be really interesting when the art is interactive. That was the only piece that I saw there that was interactive, and I just loved it. I’ll send you a link where you can see it installed in a home.

JM: That would be very cool.

HH: I’m hoping that I can find a high-tech client that might be interested in it.

I'm Not Sure Anymore, by Zipora Fried

JM: Overall, what did you think of Art Basel? Did you like it? Would you go back?

HH: Yes, I was there once before. It’s been going on for about ten years now – of course, it started in Switzerland.

JM: In Basel, right.

HH: Now Art Basel Miami has taken over and is a much bigger fair. It’s the biggest contemporary art fair in the United States and it really is the place to go to see what’s happening in contemporary art. I go so I can be experienced with dealers for clients who have a budget for and interest in contemporary art. It would be great to take a client on a shopping trip there someday.

Rubbell Family Museum, Miami. Photo by Harf Zimmerman

JM: I bet you will get to do that!

HH: It’s a great education.  There are so many collections, tours, galleries and artists’ studios that are open. There’s a new Rubell Museum. There’s The Bass Museum. There’s so much going on down there at the same time to make it a much bigger event. I loved it. We would just get up every morning and go to the different pavilions.

Piedmont Living Room by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Michelle Lee Willson

JM: Did you go with Bill?

HH: Yes.

JM: Does he like art, too?

HH: He has always liked art in a general way. His mom painted for a hobby, and he was a “Friends-type” member of SF MOMA and the De Young. But he definitely has a more nuanced appreciation for it now.

JM: Did you see anything for your clients, or were you shopping for clients at all?

HH: I wasn’t really shopping for anything specific when we were there, but I took pictures and requested information on anything I thought that they might like. There were a few things that I really liked, too.

JM: Did you get anything?

HH: No, I didn’t, but I probably would have bought a grouping of blue canvases that I saw. I don’t know what it is about groupings that I like so much! These canvases were just different shades of blue and I love minimal pieces. But anyway, they were sold on the first night.

JM: Darn it!

HH: I know. Actually, those pieces were from the Silverman Gallery in San Francisco. I went across the country and discovered an artist represented by a local gallery! There was another young artist I really liked at one of the other shows called NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance), which was an emerging artists show. I really loved this young woman’s work. She actually was selected to be shown in the Whitney.

JM: Good for her!

HH: Her pieces weren’t that expensive and I would have bought one, but they were already sold.

JM: Will you stay in touch with her, and follow her work?

HH: Well, I didn’t meet her, I met the gallery owner, but yes, I will. I’d like to see how her career develops and her style changes.

Two Panels, Yellow with Large Blue, 1970 by Ellsworth Kelly

JM: Yes, that’s interesting to watch. Do you have a couple favorite artists?

HH: Yes, I love – well, I love Yves Klein. I love Ellsworth Kelly. Let’s see. Gosh, I love so many.

JM: Have you been a fan of Ellsworth Kelly for a long time?

HH: I just love minimalism. I don’t know why. It seems so simple. I love Richard Serra. I love his big sculptural pieces.

JM: Have you seen the one at the Cantor Museum at Stanford?

HH: I haven’t. Is there a big one there?

JM: Yes– it’s a huge sculpture. It’s probably 40 feet tall and the diameter is probably 50 or 60 feet. It’s a big spiral.

HH: That’s what he’s really known for.

JM: But, you know, the angles change a little bit, so the spaces change. It’s at the Cantor Museum at Stanford, so you should go and see it.

HH: We went to Bilbao last year to see the Guggenheim that Frank Gehry designed.

The Matter of Time, by Richard Serra, at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao Photography by Elliot Levitt

JM: What a great trip!

HH: I know – it’s just amazing in and of itself. I wanted to see it. But they have this whole room –it must be 50,000 square feet – dedicated to Richard Serra. They have those humongous pieces and an audio tour so you can hear him talking about the pieces as you’re walking through them. They’re amazing.

JM: Well, my whole family loved his sculpture at Stanford. My son just made laps in and out running and yelling in sheer joy.

HH: Oh, that’s great.

JM: It’s worth a trip down there.

HH: I should go! I love his work. I also love Andy Goldsworthy. I’ve loved his work for many years and I know he’s just gotten more popular.

Andy Goldsworthy with icicle installation

JM: Have you seen Rivers and Tides?

HH: I have. I love it. I’ve seen it three times. My poor husband sat through it with me once and fell asleep. I just love it. I grew up on a farm when I was younger, so I think I identify with all of that, and I love the site-specific pieces that are temporary. I think he’s so wonderful. I would love to work on a house where a client would let me work with him and develop a piece specifically for that site.

JM: Put it out there. The universe will listen.

HH: Right, you never know. I love Vija Celmins, an artist I was first introduced to at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Penn. She does these wonderful drawings of water, just open water, but they’re just so meticulous and detailed, they’re almost like photographs. They’re just beautiful. I think I just love the simplicity or minimalist qualities of a lot of art.

Ocean, 2003, by Vija Celmins

JM: Rothko?

HH: Yes, of course.

JM: I’m amazed with Rothko, how something that’s just like a big painting of one color can be so evocative and –

Orange, Red, Orange, by Mark Rothko

HH: – I know! And dimensional.

JM: – and moving and powerful.

HH: Yes.

JM: How does he do that?

HH: It’s – I know. I wish I knew because I would –

JM: – You’d do it.

HH: I would do it. I’d be doing another Rothko-inspired piece. The way the edges are blurred and the color is deeper, in the center makes it feel like there’s more dimensionality in it. I’m not sure exactly. I just love it, too.

At Art Basel I saw a lot of pieces that involved cutting, like elaborate stenciled works on top of canvases, or paper, or just graph paper that could be, like, six feet by six feet. But the artist decided he was going to cut on every single graph line. Apparently, the process of cutting took him three months.

JM: Interesting. If he’s cutting the graph paper, did he cut all the way through?

HH: Yes, he did.

JM: Does he end up with 10 million little squares?

HH: Actually, I don’t have a picture of it. I’ll send it to you if I can find it on my iPhone. There seemed to be a lot of cutting as a theme at Art Basel this year, but I don’t think that it was intentional.

Living Room by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Michelle Lee Willson.

JM: I’ve seen a lot of filigree-type drawings that are maybe cut out of vinyl and then adhered to another surface.

HH: Yes, there was a lot of that there.

JM: Where there any other trends?

HH: Not really – I would have thought I would have seen much more having to do with technology, but I didn’t. There was just that one LED piece. I guess both the LED piece and the cutting pieces are kind of representational of the theme of dimensionality, which is a trend I’ve been noticing for a few years now.

JM: I was wondering if there would be a theme of economic downturn or anything like that.

HH: I didn’t see anything like that there, except that the shows, like NADA, Scope, and Pulse, which were the emerging artist areas, were very crowded, much more so than the big convention center. I’m sure the economy has something to do with that. For the prime attendees at Art Basel, however, the downturn wasn’t as severe.

JM: Do you get to buy art for your clients a lot? Is that part of your services?

HH: Well, I’ll tell you. This should be kind of off-the-record, but there’s nothing worse than completing a project and having the client say, “Oh, we bought this wonderful piece on vacation.” I call it Vacation Art or Honeymoon Art. It always happens to be of a scene painted, you know, along a canal, Venice, or something, or of a seaside or a landscape.  Sometimes it is just weird.  There is nothing worse than just having done all this custom work –

JM: – Oh, no, oh. You have to say, “It can go in the powder room.”

HH: I can’t even bear it. It’s so hard.

2010 Marin Designers Showcase House by Heather Hilliard Interiors. Photography by Michele Lee Willson

JM: How about the garage?

HH: My husband has that kind of art from his life before me. Just like he was a client, I told him it would look great in his office!

JM: How do you go about getting your clients to consider more sophisticated art?

HH: I often start by suggesting, “Why don’t we go to a couple of galleries together? Do you have any interest in that?” Or, “I know this gallery owner, and she’s so interesting, and tells the most fascinating stories about the artists and about the process.”

JM: Like Lisa Dolby Chadwick?

Figure with Clipped Wing, by Stephen De Stabeler, at Dolby Chadwick Gallery

HH: Yes, she’s really great. That usually piques people’s interest. Sometimes I’ll get somebody else involved like a gallery owner or a consultant. If people are really serious, like they might be in the market for a Picasso, I need to make sure to provide them adequate education.

JM: Like about cost?

HH: Well, cost, value, quality, etc. I’ve worked with Steven Platzman, who’s wonderful.  He follows the market and can help a client find the best piece for what they want. I determine whether they just want the piece because it’s a Picasso, or if they’re looking closely at investment value.

I always tell clients to buy what they really love.  Try not to worry about what its value  might be in ten years because what’s the point?

JM: Well, and can’t the value change drastically?

HH: – Yes.

JM: It seems similar to watching the stock market.

HH: Right.   If they are buying for appreciation, I definitely bring in an art consultant so they can buy at the right value.  I’ll tell this story, too, about an artist’s work that I used at one of the showcases. His name is Doug Kerr, and the SF MOMA Artists’ Gallery had just three of his drawings. I loved them. They depicted highways, bridges, and the arteries of cities. They’re beautiful – very architectural. I was trying to figure out some artwork for the Showcase House and I thought, “Okay, I’ll just take these from my dining room and put them here in the showcase.”

Setback, by Doug Kerr, 1999. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

At one point during the showcase, one of the best known art collectors in San Francisco approached me and said, “Are those for sale? My husband loves them. I’d love to buy them as a gift.” I had to tell her that they were not for sale, since they were from my dining room wall at home. She gave me her card and said, “Well, if you change your mind, just give me a call.” I never changed my mind, but I did send her information about Doug Kerr. That just goes to show – you just should buy things you really love, without regard to the market. I think that strategy has worked for a lot of the country’s great collectors: the Fishers, the Andersons, the Broads, and others.  I mean, think of Herb and Dorothy Vogel!

JM: Who are Herb and Dorothy Vogel?

HH: They are American art collectors. Herb was a postal clerk and Dorothy a librarian. They lived in New York, and starting in the mid-60′s, they began buying art.  They used Herb’s salary to purchase works by unknown artists and Dorothy’s salary paid for living expenses. Years later, after filling their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment with thousands of artworks, their collection was worth many, many millions of dollars. They donated their entire collection to the National Gallery of Art so they could clear the walls and start again.

JM: What a great story!

2011 San Francisco Decorator Showcase Library by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Michelle Lee Willson.

HH: I know.  Art is a lot like beautiful interior design, you should live with what you love. It will definitely enrich your life in one way or another.

JM: So true! Well, on that note, I think we might need to close. Thank you again for spending this time with me!

Jill Moran

HH: You’re quite welcome.

Jill Moran is a construction professional with 20 years of varied experience in high-end residential remodeling. Her recent entry into motherhood, timed precisely with the downturn in the local construction industry, has resulted in a slight re-engineering of her career. She currently works closely with the management team at Mueller Nicholls, with an emphasis on communicating to the world at large about residential remodeling.

Heather Hilliard. Photography by Michele Lee Willson

Please join us for an interview with San Francisco Interior Designer Heather Hilliard.  Her work is instantly recognizable for its classic yet modern appeal.  She uses traditional materials, like upholstery fabric woven from horsehair, or camel wool area rugs with blanket stitching, creating pieces that are luxurious but also quite durable. Well-educated and down-to-earth, her career trajectory reads a bit like a primer on  “Six degrees of separation.”  Get to know her here, and then catch her at the upcoming 2012 San Francisco Decorator Showcase House!

JM: Let’s start the interview.  Thank you so much for participating!

HH: Oh, thank you!  I feel like I’m on Fresh Air.

JM: That’s right.  Thank you for being on Fresh Air.  This is Terry Gross…  (Laughter)  So, let’s start by talking about your extensive education.  You got your BA in Art History from La Salle.

HH: Art History, yes.

JM: Did you grow up on the East Coast?

HH: I did.  I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania.

JM: Which one?

HH: Nazareth, which is near Bethlehem. It’s in the Lehigh Valley, and it’s a really small town, with two main stop lights, and a little roundabout.  I walked to school every day when I was young.

Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Photograph by Brigita McKelvie

JM: Was it a one-room schoolhouse?

HH: No, no, no, I mean, it wasn’t that bad.

JM: Well, that wouldn’t be bad.

HH: Well, actually, even before we moved to that town, though, I did live on a farm, and my father raised Black Angus steer as a hobby.  It was kind of a gentlemen’s farm.

JM: Wow.

HH: We also had a pond, which was stocked with fish.  I was really outdoorsy when I was young and didn’t watch cartoons like most kids.  I was always outside doing things, fishing in the pond, or playing in the cornfields.

JM: How many acres did you guys have?

HH: I think it was 75.  We leased a lot of the land out to real farmers in the area who actually did work the land. Eventually, my parents decided that we’d be better off if we moved to a town where we actually had neighbors and could participate in going to the library or other school activities without having to transport kids over to our house.

San Francisco Kitchen by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Michele Lee Willson

JM: Do you have siblings?

HH: I have a sister, who is three years younger.  I got her to move out to Napa a few years ago.

JM: Great!

HH:But first, I got my parents to move out here.

I am so happy they’re close. In Pennsylvania, they ate heavy “Pennsylvania Dutch,” essentially German, food. Now they have slimmed down, drink soy milk, and are living a healthier lifestyle.

JM: That’s terrific!

HH: I know.  I moved out here in 2000.

JM: What brought you out here?

HH: I had been working in nonprofits.

JM: Was that the Art Institute?

HH: Well, I had worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for five years.  Then – remember this is not on my résumé because it’s so unrelated to what I do now – I also worked for three years at a place called The Academy of Natural Sciences doing PR and media relations for environmental scientists.  I worked with the paleontologists, ichthyologists, botanists, and the entomologists at the Patrick Center for Environmental Research.  I translated into layman’s terms what it means to study diatoms and streams.

Diatom, photography by Argonne National laboratories

JM: Wow.

HH: One aspect of these microscopic organisms is that they can help scientists understand how healthy a stream is.

JM: Was that in Philadelphia?

HH: Yes.

JM: How did you get into that position?

HH: While I was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for five years, a boss I had, who has turned out to be a great mentor, said, “I’m going be leaving to become the Vice President of Marketing at the Academy of Natural Sciences – do you have any interest?”  And I said, “I don’t know how to do PR or marketing.”  And she said, “Well, we’ll be working on a really big project.  We can hire a firm to get you up to speed, and then, you can take it from there.”

JM: Wow!

HH: I know.  It was a wonderful opportunity.  I mean, who does that?  Who hires someone and says, essentially, “We’ll give you coaching”?  So, it was a great experience.  I did PR for the museum side, too, which had many exhibitions, including dinosaurs, insects, and wildlife dioramas.

Tyrannasaurus Rex at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Photography by Hoag Levins.

JM: When you were at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, were you in the PR department?

HH: No, I was in development.

JM: In development—so raising money?

HH: Yes, but I never actually had to ask for money.  It wasn’t like “smiling and dialing,” thank God.  I was in charge of a group, eventually, called The Friends and Young Friends of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  That group raised money for acquisitions for the  museum’s permanent collection.  My job was to get people who were at The Friends or the Young Friends level, say, ages 35 and under, engaged in the museum and the activities.  We’d have social events to create connections with potential future donors. Then, hopefully, the museum would get them to start moving up into the higher levels.  I would take them with curators to artists’ galleries or museums in New York.  Once we took them to see the Monet exhibit when it was in Chicago.  We flew in for a day.  Then, we went to see a contemporary art collector’s home.  It was an amazing experience – I was an Art History major!   Since I was on the development side, I wasn’t participating in creating or curating exhibitions, but I had access to all of the different departments and the curators.  We had programs that were specific to the department we were raising money for, which changed each year.  It might have been the 20th Century department, or the American Art department, or the Asian Art department.  It was just really wonderful to have access to the curators, and events, and things like that, and to organize tours.

Hillsborough Interiors by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Michelle Lee Willson.

JM: How did you get hired at the Philadelphia Museum?

HH: That is a really random story.

JM: As they so often are.

HH: I know; it really is.  So, I was at the Institute of Contemporary Art as an intern.

JM: What were your duties as an intern?

HH: Everything from organizing the first Day without Art – I think that started in ’92 – do you know what that is?

Day Without Art Poster, 1998

JM: No.

HH: It’s a day when the museums close in recognition of the artists who have passed as a result of AIDS.  I think I worked on that the first year.  I also helped the curators because it was a small institution.  Sometimes I did research for upcoming exhibitions – just a little bit of everything, but it was a fantastic experience.

JM: Did you get a job at the Institute right after you graduated?

2011 San Francisco Decorator Showcase Home Library by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Michele Lee Willson

HH: Oh, I was still in school when I started that internship.  After I had graduated I started working right away.  It was,’92, and, there weren’t a lot of jobs at all.  Real estate, everything was just dead.  Anyway, I was in IKEA with my mom, and we were in the lighting department, and she was looking at halogen bulbs, trying to understand the difference between halogen and incandescent bulbs.  An older man wearing a wool sweater with paint all over the front of him heard us talking about this, and he walked over and explained the difference.  We said, “Oh, you must be an artist,” and just started chatting with him about the paint on his sweater. I told him that I was doing an internship at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Penn.  And he said, “Oh, I know the president of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  Why don’t I arrange a lunch?  May I have your phone number?”  So I gave it to him.  I don’t know why.

Afterwards, my mom said, “You are not getting together with that old man!”  She said, “Haven’t you read the papers?  Don’t you see the news?  You’re in Philadelphia!  You never know.  This guy could just be trying to – you know! I’ve heard of this before where young women are solicited by photographers.  They say they want to take pictures of them.  What if he wants to paint you?  Or what if it’s just a ploy to get you to his place?”  I mean, she put the fear of I don’t know what in me.

JM: Oh, dear.

HH: So, the guy ended up calling, and leaving a message, and saying, “Okay, Heather.  I’ve made an arrangement to meet Robert Montgomery Scott,” who is the quintessential blue-blood President of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  His family was the subject of the film “The Philadelphia Story” with Katherine Hepburn.

The Philadelphia Story

JM: My goodness!

HH: After listening to the message, I thought, “What the hell?  This guy had paint all over him.  You just never know.”  And I called my mom and I said, “He said he made an appointment for the lunch and he gave me Mr. Scott’s secretary’s name, Alexis.”  She said, “No, you’re not going.”  She was adamant, even though I was living on my own in an apartment.  So, I had never called him back because I thought, “Okay, my mom is right.  This guy is crazy.  He’s just trying to get me somewhere.”  In the message he told me where to meet them, at what time, and said, “If I don’t hear from you, we’ll see you there.”  That day came, and he called and left message, and said, “Heather, this is Bob Donner.  I’m sitting here at such-and-such restaurant in Philadelphia, and we’re just sitting at the bar having a drink, but we’re waiting for you.”  And then, he called back like 15 minutes later, and left a message, and said, “I’m still here with Mr. Scott.  We’re just going take our seats now and I hope you’re on your way.”

Custom Chair designed by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Michele Lee Wilson

JM: Right.

HH: So, I called my mom and she said, “I just can’t believe this guy really knows the President of the Art Museum.”  I let, probably, a couple hours go by, and then, I thought, “Well, what if he really was for real?”  So, I called the restaurant and I said, “Hi, my name is Heather.” My maiden name is Schultz.  “I’m calling because I was supposed to meet Mr. Donner,” and the hostess or whatever said, “Oh, yes; he was in today with Mr. Scott.”  In my mind I was saying, “Oh, my God!  Robert Montgomery Scott?”

She said, “Yes, they were here– were you supposed to be joining them?  They were supposed to have three in their party and they waited for a while.  They just had lunch.”  So, I called the guy, Bob Donner, and said, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve been sick – so sick that I had to leave town, and go home, and have my parents take care of me.  You know, I thought I had mono.”  I just made up this elaborate excuse and he said, “Well, don’t worry.  Don’t worry about it.” He had such joie de vivre and I could just see him sitting there.  They were both older, so they were probably having Manhattans, or martinis at lunch. It was that kind of a place.

So, he said, “Well, at any rate, call Alexis, his assistant.  She’s expecting your call, and he’d love to meet with you.”

So I called, and sure enough, it was like she knew I was calling and she said, “Oh, yes, well, what about next week?” and she made an appointment.  I went in to see him and I was sitting in the office in the Art Museum – in the President’s Office with a Cézanne and Picasso on the wall in his office.  And he just chatted with me and asked how I knew Bob Donner.  How did I know this guy?  Well, it turns out, this guy used to be the President of RCA.

Robert Montgomery Scott didn’t tell me that, but eventually, it came out from Bob Donner that that’s how he knew Mr. Scott because they had been on the board together.

Then he walked me down to HR and said, “Tell Heather every job that is posted and not posted, and make sure she is working here soon.”  So that’s how I got that job.

JM: Wow.

HH: It was a development position, but, you know, even those were really highly sought after.  I was so fortunate, and it was such a wonderful position.  The exposure to the donors, the curators, and the education staff – it was really a great experience.  I’m so lucky.  I just used to walk through the halls thinking, “This is a dream job!”  It doesn’t get any better, you know?  It was amazing.

Philadelphia Museum of Art

JM: And you left with your mentor?

HH: Yes, she was hired to be the Senior Vice President of Marketing at the Academy of Natural Sciences, and she knew that I was ready for a change. I always thought, “Okay, maybe I’ll go back to school for Art History, and go on for a higher degree there, and maybe become a curator.”  But, she said, “Why don’t you just give this a shot?”

And so, I did, and it was really fun.  I mean, I got a piece on Nightline for discoveries that the ichthyologists and paleontologists made.  It was a bit of a sidetrack, bur I really enjoyed it.

2009 San Francisco Decorator Showcase House by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Caren Alpert.

JM: Were you writing?

HH: Yes, I was translating scientific research papers that were peer-reviewed and submitted to journals like Science into something that the layperson could understand.  I would distill all of that complicated information into something comprehensible for ordinary folks.  For example, have you heard about these big scares with the mercury levels in fish?

JM: Yes.

HH: When I was working there, in the late ’90′s, the Ichthyology department had fish in their collections from the early 1800s.  They were able to take fish from different areas of the country from different oceans and lakes, and test them for mercury.  It turned out that in the fish from the 1800′s, mercury was present in the same level that they’d been finding in the fish from the late 1990′s.  I found that really interesting.

JM: So, you would read these very dense scientific texts and then extract the information and write it in a way that –

HH: Well, I would try to convey how the science  impacted people’s lives.  Is the research relevant to the average person?  I also wrote a lot about the importance of biodiversity, which was also pretty fascinating.  It seems so far away now, but it was a really great experience.  You just never know where life will takes you.

JM: So true.  Then how did you get to California?

HH: I really wanted to get out of the nonprofit world.  My first job was making $18,000.00 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  I had made a lot more than that at the Academy of Natural Sciences, but still, it was a nonprofit.

JM: Right.

HH: And I thought, you know, “I really like going out to eat.  I love vacations.  I love seeing the world.”

Hillsborough Interior by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Michelle Lee Willson.

JM: The simple things.

HH: I thought, “I have to transition into the for-profit sector, but what am I going do with eight years of nonprofit experience?”  This was at the time when everything was happening out here in terms of high-tech.

JM: Right.

HH: So I thought, “Well, if I can distill information from scientists’ writings, surely I can do some type of PR for high-tech companies as well.”  So, I came out here and got a job.  You’re not going to believe this, but I came out here and basically lived in a friend’s prayer room.

JM: Really?

HH: Yes! I had a roommate whom I had introduced to her husband; they’re Indian.  He was from the Bay Area and they said, “Move out, and you can move in with us!  You can stay in our prayer room until you find a place and a job.”  I said, “No, no, I can’t do that.  My God, you guys are newlyweds.” She was expecting a baby.  They said, “Oh, no, we insist, we owe our relationship to you.  We wouldn’t have found each other if you hadn’t introduced us for a blind date.”

JM: That is very generous!

HH: I know.  And they said, “We’re Indian.  We’re used to having family stay with us for long periods of time.”  I was thinking, “No, no,” but even her husband said, “No, you’ve got to.  This is a risk you have to take.  There’s so much going on out here.”  My friend was working for a startup.  And so I thought, “Oh, what the hell?”

So, I gave probably six weeks’ notice at my job, and I moved into their prayer room on an inflatable mattress.

2009 San Francisco Decorator Showcase House by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Caren Alpert.

.JM: It sounds very serene though.

HH: Sort of – there wasn’t a lot of praying going on in that room because there was no room for it.  It kind of had to be cleared out.

JM: Oh, dear.

HH: So I moved out here, and then, got a job – thank God – soon after.  I can’t believe I just picked up and left!  I worked for a small agency called Mindshare, which ended up going under about six months after I took the job.  They were representing many small startups in the supply chain technology and CRM area.

I was feeling confident that if I could understand and translate the process of, say, an ornithologist discovering a new bird species in South America, then I could just as easily figure out supply chain technology.  However, it was really a brief experience, and then the firm folded.  At that time I was seeing my now husband, and I said, “I don’t know what I’m going do.  I moved out here.  I got this job.  Now, there are no jobs.  It’s a complete downturn.”  It seemed like a total bust.  No one was working.  Everybody was moving back home to the different states where they had come from.  He said, “Well, what do you really want to do?”  I said, “I hated high-tech.  I do not want to do high-tech PR.  That was a way to get out here, but it’s not what I want to do.”

He suggested, “Well, what about doing what you used to do?”  I said, “I don’t want to work in nonprofit.  I wish there was a way to bridge the art with something else – maybe design.”  It was really through his encouragement that I decided to give that a shot.  He said, “Why don’t you just start taking classes at Berkeley Extension?” I ended up taking about three classes there.

JM: I know a lot of really successful designers that have taken classes at Berkeley.

2009 San Francisco Designers Showcase House by Heather Hilliard Design. Photography by Michele Lee Willson

HH: I thought it was great, but at the time, I thought, “Well, this is a certificate program, but I think I should get a Master’s if I’m going put in this much time.”

I also took a couple of classes at Stanford.  One was Art of the ‘90s, the 1990s. It focused on just that decade.  Another one was Finding and Developing Your Creativity, which was taught by a psychologist.

I was really enjoying the design coursework, and then 9/11 happened.  I had been in California for about a year.  My husband (we were still just dating at the time) was selling his company, and after 9/11, I thought, “At some point, I want to move back to the East Coast to be near my family.  Even living just a few hours away would be nice just in case something like this happens.”

JM: Yes.

HH: I missed them, and ideally I wanted to live somewhat close to them.  He said, “Well, we can go back.”  We weren’t even engaged or anything.  I said, “Okay, good.  I want to go.”  I asked him what he was going to do. He didn’t know, but he wrote to one of his professors at MIT, who then wrote a letter of introduction for him for Wharton.  Wharton’s first response was to point out that he already had an MBA.  But he said, “Well, I saw something on the website about a Visiting Scholar program.  Could I just do that?”  So, he became a Visiting Scholar.  Then I enrolled at Moore College of Art.  I did a semester there, and then I applied for the Master’s program in design at Drexel.  I had completed about a year there, and then I thought, “Oh my gosh, why did we leave California?”  One day there was a terrible ice storm in Philadelphia.  I came home to the apartment that we had bought and were renovating to find the kitchen flooded, and the hard wood floors ruined.  The reverse osmosis system had burst during the storm.  That very same day, my husband was out in California at a business meeting and he called me after having run five miles along the Embarcadero.

JM: Outside.

HH: He said, “Oh, it’s so beautiful out here today.”  I said, “I think I made a terrible mistake.”

JM: Oh.

HH: I was just standing there with water all over the kitchen floor from the broken reverse osmosis system.

JM: A sign from the universe.

Green House, 2009, by Kyung Woo Han

HH: I know!  I know.  I thought, “I can’t believe I just dragged this guy out here, and he bought a place.  I’ve been to two schools and he’s happy in his Visiting Scholar program.  I want to go back to California.”  When he came back and we had dinner.  I said, “I just think I want to go back.”  He said, “Okay, I’m glad I didn’t sell the place back there yet.”  He was renting it out, just in case.

JM: He sounds very flexible.

HH: Yes, he is, and he’s very supportive.  I think because he’s a little older and he’s had his own successes -

JM: He wants to see you have yours, too.

HH: Yes.  So there I was, having put in a year at Drexel in a Master’s program, plus a semester at Moore.  I wasn’t sure how to finish my coursework in California.  He’s said, “Well, I’m sure there are schools in San Francisco.”  He’s pretty fluid in his thinking about education, since he’s been to approximately 14 schools.  He said, “Well, just fly out and see if you can get an interview.”   So I got an interview at the Academy of Art at San Francisco.  I flew back and saw Nan Rosenblatt, who was the head of the Interior Design Department at the time.  I guess it was a good thing I did the year at Drexel because they wouldn’t accept anyone into their MFA program who didn’t already have an undergraduate degree in Architecture or Design.  Having that year allowed me to get a higher level of training in the MFA program, but it was like starting from ground zero.  I had to start all over again.

Fountains on the Drexel Campus

JM: You’re flexible, too.

HH: So then we moved back, and Bill became a visiting scholar at Berkeley.

JM: How did he get that position?

HH: Through good fortune.  I had just started the program at the Academy.  At first I thought, you know, “I can’t believe I’ve just been through all this – all of these classes, working toward the end goal of a Master’s and now I’m starting all over again.”  But it seems like it was all meant to be because I learned different things at different places.  The program at the Academy was surprisingly challenging for me.  All of the students in my department were international and probably 90 percent of them were already architects in other countries – many from Asia.  They already came with so much knowledge and they were so far advanced.  A lot of them had worked on big projects – commercial and hotel.  They came here for a second degree in a related field to get the American experience, but they really already had all they needed.  They didn’t need to get an MFA in Interior Architecture because they already had so much familiarity with their field.  I really learned a lot from the other students.  It was great to be there.

Interiors by Heather Hilliard Design.

JM: Is it a two-year process?

HH: No, it’s three-year.

JM: And were you working during the time?

HH: Yes, yes.

JM: Was that when you were working with Tracy Banks?

HH: No, I was with her before we moved back to Philadelphia when I was taking classes at Cal and Stanford.    Our friend had sold a place and Tracy had staged it to get it ready to go on the market.  Bill had suggested that I work there.  Staging homes taught me some skills that I don’t think I would have learned working in a design firm or in school.  I learned how to put emphasis in certain areas of a room, or how to draw attention to a focal point, scale and proportion, and doing those things quickly.

It was interesting, but I knew that I didn’t want to do that.  There isn’t any client interaction in staging.

JM: While you were going to Drexel and Moore, were you working at Marguerite Rodgers?

HH: Yes.  That started out as an internship, but she said, “No, you have to work part time because as an intern, other obligations could take precedence over your work here.  If I pay you, I own you.”  At that time I thought, “Well, gosh, that’s kind of crazy,” but it was true.  I just took it so much more seriously because I was getting paid, and I was expected to be there to participate in specific assignments.

Marguerite Rodgers, photography by Michael Persico

It was a great experience and I learned a lot from her.  She was doing high-end residential, but she started in hospitality, and made a name for herself in the rebirth of Philadelphia when Mayor Ed Rendell revitalized the city.  There was so much economic development downtown.  She did a lot of restaurant design, which she then parlayed into high-end residential work.  That was my first exposure to high-end residential design.  You know, I think she had a similar background to you – I think that she worked in a woodshop.

JM: Oh, really?

HH: Yes, and she went to art school.  Her husband is a really interesting architect – Timberlake?  He’s won all kinds of AIA awards.  You should look him up.  A guy that my husband met through Wharton was an architect, and worked with her husband on something, and made the introduction for me to work with her.

2010 Marin Designers Showcase House by Heather Hilliard Interiors. Photography by Michele Lee Willson

JM: It’s funny how a simple introduction can have such a big impact.

HH: It’s so true!

Please stay tuned for Part Two, where we learn about how Heather got hired at The Wiseman Group, and how she convinces her clients to take design risks.

Jay Jeffers—2011

JM: You are at the helm of your own company.  How many people work here?

JJ: Five people are here permanently, and then we have two interns, an accountant and a publicist who rents office space.  We have a very active office!

JM: As the principal of the firm running your company, do you still get to do design?

JJ: I still get to do some.  I would love to do more, but I think that’s always the struggle of somebody who’s running a company.  But I am structuring the company in such a way that I can be a part of the design development phase, which is conceptual, bringing ideas to the client and then getting the clients’ approval and buy-off.  Then it gets turned over to the other people in my office, who are incredibly talented and creative and capable themselves.

I get to come in at the end when it’s installed.  The accessorizing, the artwork – that part is really fun for me.  I’m always a nervous wreck for installations, and one of my designers a few months ago said to me, “We don’t want you at the installation. Just wait until the furniture is in and then come in and do your thing.”  I said, “Okay, I love this.  I’m happy to do that.”

Living room by JDG. Photography by Matthew Millman.

JM: Great.

JJ: Yes, it’s good.  Sometimes I wish I could be much more involved in the details because I love the details of pulling a concept together, but there’s just not time for that.

JM: How did you get a team around you that is capable of doing this?

JJ: Hiring good people.  My design principal has been with me for five years, and our other designer has been with us for almost three years, and our project manager has been with us for almost three years.  They’re all great people.  I think  there’s certainly something to be said for an energy that attracts people to each other, as well as a strong work ethic, and we’ve been very lucky with finding the right people for the right jobs.

JM: Do the people who work here have kind of a similar design aesthetic as you so they’ll intuitively know, “Well, Jay wouldn’t like that, so we’re not going do that”?

JJ: Yes.  Their tastes are similar, but they all have their own design aesthetic.  Part of the reason that younger designers leave and go and do their own thing or go to other companies is because their creative vision is not being heard.  But I feel like – and I think that they would agree with me – that I listen to them, and I think the design is better for it at the end because it is more than one mind melding together.

At the end of the day, it’s my decision, so there are things that I will reject, but then there are things that I don’t reject, because I want to give it a shot.  Nine times out of ten, I’m glad that I did it.

Bedroom by Jay JDG. Photography by Matthew Millman.

JM: How do you know when something isn’t good?  Do you have an internal compass?  You studied at Cal in their Interior Design program for a while.

JJ: Yes.

JM: Did you do the whole program?

JJ: No, I didn’t finish it.  I studied for about two years and got the basics and really learned it on the job.

JM: So how do you know when something is going to work?

JJ: I think it’s an instinctual thing.  Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely times when I’ll say, “I’m not sure if that’s going work.  Let’s just hope for the best!”  I will ask everybody else’s opinion, but there’s a point where I just have to be confident in what I’m doing.  Usually it does work.  So there’s definitely something instinctual and there are lot of people that are really good designers.  But you have to have the business part of it to be able to be successful, whether that’s you or whether it’s a business partner.  For many good designers, a lot of the process is instinctual.

JM: Do you attribute some of the success that you have at your firm to the fact that you have a business degree?  Has that helped you?

JJ: I think it has.  I’ve gotten a lot of press.  Even before I was really a designer I would send magazines pictures of my various bedroom designs.  When I was in design school and moved into a new apartment I took pictures of that and sent it out.  I had a website before any other designers that I know did, and I actually got clients from it.  Having that idea or that understanding of getting your name out there –

JM: Being comfortable doing that.

JJ: Yes.  I think that definitely has brought success maybe sooner than it would have.  I think eventually it would have come regardless, but maybe it happened faster.

JM: When did you form your own firm?

Jay’s office at JDG Studio. Photography by Drew Altizer

JJ: In the summer of 1999, so July will be 12 years.

JM: That’s great.  Did you open both offices in LA and here at the same time?

JJ: No.  I think we opened LA in 2004.  I’m trying to remember now.  That sounds about right, but I’ve since closed it.

JM: Was that a function of the economy?

JJ: Well, for several years it had just been a name and an address, and I just hadn’t staffed it.  It was good for bringing business in, but San Francisco got very busy and LA got less interesting to me in terms of being there all the time.  I found myself driving all the time.  But the way the internet and everything else functions today, we can do jobs anywhere from our office here.  So it just worked out better to close that space.

JM: How would you compare the amount of design energy or enthusiasm of LA to the Bay Area?  Is there more design happening in the Bay Area than in LA?  I heard someone complaints recently that there’s not really very much happening in the Bay Area around design, and I was just surprised to hear that.  What do you think of that?

JJ: I think the Bay Area always gets a bad rap.  We’re a smaller community than LA and New York, but there are some seriously talented people here who are very well recognized across the country – Paul Wiseman, Suzanne Tucker, Walker-Warner Architects, Walker Moody, to name a few.  A lot of local designers have been recognized by Architectural Digest and everyone else over many years as real tastemakers and stars.  I don’t think that design has slowed down in the Bay Area at all.

Michael Taylor table available at Modern One, Benjamin Storck’s LA gallery

Because of the economy I’ve seen a lot of antiques shops close down.  Some of my favorite places that I would go to for mid-century furniture are no longer here, but I think that’s happened everywhere.  Since we’re a smaller community, we’re hit harder when something like Benjamin Storck, who had a fantastic 20^th century furniture gallery, closes down.  He has a shop in LA and has had it there forever, but when he closes down in SF, it’s a real loss.   When one or two shops close in LA, it’s not that big of a loss, comparatively.

JM: I noticed in the book that I was reading in your lobby that it was given to you by Boris Vervoordt.

JJ: Yes.

Boris Vervoordt (right) with German artist Gotthard Graubner at the Vervoordt Gallery in Antwerp.

JM: He’s an international art dealer, isn’t he?

JJ: Yes.

JM: And how did you come across that book?

JJ: I was traveling in Antwerp.  Boris has a beautiful, very contemporary gallery outside of Antwerp.  There’s also a beautiful castle that his father lives in that he grew up in.  They still live there, but everything is for sale.  It’s full of antiques.  When I was there I took a tour through it and Boris was supposed to meet us, but he was in Venice and didn’t get there in time.  He actually called me the next day and we ended up having lunch, and he then he showed us all around Antwerp and spent the next three days with us.

JM: Wow!

JJ: Boris happens to be my age and a fun person to hang out with, so we clicked in that respect.  I met his father as well, but we didn’t really hang out.

JM: Right.  On a slightly different topic, in one of the interviews I read about you online, you mentioned Billy Baldwin as an influence.  I was wondering if you could talk about him and how he’s influenced you.

Billy Baldwin in his New York apartment, circa 1973. Photography by Durston Saylor.

JJ: Well, actually Richard Witzel, my mentor, had a Billy Baldwin book that he’d bought when he was a kid, or probably when he was in his 20s in the 1970s.  I read that book when I was going to school, and it was just the words – the things that he said.  He talked about mixing contemporary and classic furniture pieces.  He talked about using bold patterns.  He talked about using bright colors, and the entire book was in black and white.  Just reading about his aesthetic sensibilities, I thought, “This is brilliant.”

I had had these ideas gestating in my head, but I’d never really heard anybody outside my head say, “It’s okay to do it.” These were things that I myself was doing in my own apartment:  going to a flea market and finding a traditional piece and a modern piece and putting them together, or finding some old piece of furniture, with big flowers on it and re-upholstering it and that sort of thing.  That’s what he did.  He’s always been an influence.

JM: Do you think that interior designers are born interior designers?

JJ: Yes.  I think so.

JM: That’s what it seems like to me.

JJ: There are many different directions that I could have gone – in fact, I tell this story all the time: when I decided I was going be an interior designer, I had a really amazing boss at The Gap.  I went and talked to her and told her what I wanted to do, that I was going to go back to school, that the classes were at night, and that I wanted to figure out a way to cut back my hours and still work within my same job capacity.  In a corporate environment, that doesn’t usually happen.  But my boss was really supportive and figured out a way for me to do that.

So I would work from 7:30 in the morning till 1:30 in the afternoon, and then I would go and do my classes, and I would also go and work for Richard Witzel, and then go to classes at night.  During that time I started getting into cooking because I realized, “Okay, I’m not going out to eat anymore.”  And I really considered being a chef.

JM: Interesting.

JJ: I really got into baking more than cooking and I really contemplated not being an interior designer and being a chef, or owning a bakery or something like that.  After talking to several people, I decided that it probably wasn’t the right avenue for me.  That was just another creative outlet.  I think that creative people that are born to do this kind of thing – maybe it’s interior design, maybe it’s fine art, maybe it’s even advertising.

JM: Back to the design in the Bay Area.  So I’ve been in construction for about 20 years and it always strikes me that there is a lot of talent out here.

JJ: Yes, absolutely.

JM: People put out really good work across the board.

JJ: Yeah.

JM: So when someone says, “The Bay Area has nothing going on in design,” I just don’t understand where they’re coming from.

JJ: Well, I think that it’s harder to get published, you know?

JM: For design firms from the Bay Area?

JJ: It’s very easy for a publication that’s based in New York to go scout a project in New York or around the New York area.  They usually also have scouts in the LA area.  So it’s just more difficult for projects from the Bay Area.  Don’t get me wrong, I think that national publications have done great job in recent years of including Bay Area, but usually, if you open a magazine, there will be four spreads.  Three of them will be in New York and one will be in San Francisco, or two will be in LA and one will be in New York and one will be in San Francisco or around the Bay Area or – San Francisco includes the entire bay.

JM: Of course.

JJ: We’re just not as prominent as other places are.  So then people assume there’s not much going on or there’s not as much talent, but I think that there is.

JM: Do you have any hope about changes in Architectural Digest and being able to get published in there with Margaret Russell at the helm?

Margaret Russell, now editor-in-chief at Architectural Digest Magazine

JJ: The magazine looks so much better already.  It sings and it’s fresh and it comes in and it lands on my desk and I’m kind of like, “Oh!”  When the old Architectural Digest would land on my desk my response was often, “Oh dear,” and I would open it up and say, “Wow, that’s what they put on the cover?”  So I am very hopeful.  Margaret Russell has been good to me over the years.

JM: You’ve been in Elle Décor before?

JJ: I haven’t had a spread in it, but I’ve been in it for other aspects, quotes and things, and then we did the Elle Décor Showhouse last year.  She was involved in choosing the designers and we did the master bedroom for it.

JM: I remember that room and it was quite beautiful.

JJ: Thank you.  Then she left before we’d finished the show house, but she’s been great to me over the years, so I look forward to the day that she says, “Yes, absolutely we want something for Architectural Digest!”

JM: Do you send her pings about things that you’re doing?

JJ: Of course!

JM: Great!

JJ: Why not?

JM: Well yes, of course you would.  I just don’t know what it’s like to try to get published in a magazine like that or any other publications like that.

JJ: I work with a publicist and we strategize everything that we’re going to send out.  I learned early on to shoot my own work, to not wait for somebody to shoot it for you for a magazine or something.  We shoot it for our records and then we use those photos to send out to magazines.  And we’re very strategic about where we think it would go.  There’s so much competition out there and now there are fewer publications.   Only one out of five interiors that we send out may be accepted to be published, and that’s just the way it is.

JM: Right.

JJ: So we have to be strategic about putting it on our  website, putting it on a blog, and putting it on Facebook, and then getting the word out there in any way that we can.  We can’t necessarily rely on national publications – or local publications.

JM: Well, you recently had a nice spread in California Home and Design.

JDG was recently featured as the cover story at California Home + Design

JJ: Which we were thrilled with!

JM: It’s hard to get in there.

JJ: It was really fantastic and we were thrilled.  It was our second cover for California Home and Design, so we were really excited to be on the cover and we actually got some calls from that feature.   It’s very rare that somebody calls and says, “I saw you in the magazine and I want to hire you,” but we got several calls from that spread.

JM: That’s great!

JJ: Yes.

JM: You know I heard Mark English give a talk once and he was kind of bemoaning the fact that he’s been in a lot of publications and had gotten a lot of awards, but he doesn’t think he gets any work from it.  I also haven’t been hearing good things about returns from print advertising.  Do you do any print advertising?

JJ: We do the Fall Antique Show catalog and the Decorator’s Showcase catalog, but I wouldn’t hire an interior designer off of an ad.  The person that does hire an interior designer off of an ad is probably not my client.

Red Lacquer and Gilded Panel (detail), after 18th-century Chinoiserie Paneled Room. Painted by Warner Graves and Eric Ismay. Photography by Douglas Sandberg. Courtesy of F. Scott and Terry Gross.

JM: But the people who have called  from that recent (California Home + Design) article seem like they might be good clients?

JJ: Yes.  I have found that local press is much better for us in terms of actual work than national press, but you know, it’s all layering.  Usually someone will say, “Hey, I saw you in this magazine and my friend recommended you,” or, “My friend recommended you and then I went to your website and I realized that you had done that room that I loved at the Elle Décor Showhouse, but I didn’t know it was you until my friend told me to go look at your website,” you know, that sort of thing.  So it’s all a layering effect.

JM: Are you doing showcase homes quite often?

JJ: No.  We’ve done one every year for the last several years, but unless somebody calls us soon, we’re not doing one this year.  We’re not doing San Francisco, and I don’t know of any other show houses in this area.

JM: Is Elle Décor doing another one?

JJ: They’re doing one in New York.

JM: Oh, okay.

JJ: And I’m not doing that one.  We’ve been approached to do the Kips Bay Showhouse in New York, and I would love to do that.  I’ve got a project there right now, so I think we’ll wait and see if we can try to get in when this project gets closer to being finished so we have sort of some leverage there.

Location of 2011 Kips Bay Showcase House, 163 East 63rd Street, New York

JM: Those are a lot of work.

JJ: They are a lot of work.

JM: And it’s a large financial outlay too, right?

JJ: Yes.

JM: Have you found that the showcase houses do translate into work?

2009 Metropolitan Showcase Home by JDG.

JJ: We did the Met Home Showhouse, and the house was on the market and the client that purchased the house hired us to do the rest of the house.  We were thrilled with that.

In 2005 we did a showcase house and that house was on the market, and the clients that purchased the house hired us, but they didn’t hire us for the room that we did there.  In fact, we tore that room apart and did something else.  They had seen something else that we had done and liked it.  Actually I’ve had calls from the Elle Décor Showhouse.  I’m just starting with a new client that bought a house in Sausalito that saw the Elle Décor Showhouse and called us from that.

JM: Very nice.

JJ: So it does work.  I have done other show houses that nothing has come from, but it’s all that layering effect.

JM: Do you have a Facebook page?

JJ: I do have a Facebook page.  I’m terrible about updating it.  We’re actually refurbishing our website right now and we are going to incorporate a blog into it.

JM: I was wondering about that.

JJ: I’m not going to be a daily blogger.  It’s will be a blog on beauty, or something like that – just beautiful things or things that we love.  We’ll put our interiors on there and if we’re designing furniture, we’ll put progress shots of furniture and things like that.  It’s not going to be an everyday occurrence.

Floating sandblasted coffee table by Jeffers Design Group

JM: Are you going to do the writing yourself?

JJ: Probably not.  My intention is not to.

JM: I was wondering about your signature persimmon orange color.  How did that all come about?  Do you consider it to be a signature color – because it’s associated with you?  Are you tired of being asked about it?

Squared oval dining table in white lacquer finish by JDG.

JJ: No, I’m not tired of being asked.  I mean it’s certainly a color that I use a lot and that I love.  It’s a warm color, but it’s not an obtrusive color.  I’m trying to think if I’ve done an interior where we haven’t used it.  There was no orange in the Elle Décor Showhouse.

JM: I noticed that.

JJ: There’s very little of it in a home that we just did.  So I don’t know, it’s just a color that I like.

JM: Have you always liked it?

JJ: Yes.  I mean, it’s not something that has been my favorite color for the last decade and always will be.  Ten years ago I was using a lot of green.  My whole house was painted green: bright green, army green and all different sorts of greens.  Then at some point that changed and I got tired of using green.  I don’t know if that’s when orange came about.  We’ve also been working with a lot of grays and taupes and cool colors these days.  Six years ago if womeone had told me that I would be working in gray today, I would have laughed.  I had always been about warm tones and everything being warm, and now it’s different.  Everything is cool.

Detail of custom ottoman used at 2010 Elle Décor Showcase House. Photography by Matthew Millman.

JM: That’s interesting because when I looked at your website, it seems like a lot of the projects have a very vivid use of wild colors, which I love.  I think it’s great.  Do you think that that design style reflects the exuberance of your personality?

JJ: Well, I’m a generally happy person, and I always have liked color.  I think in the beginning of my career I used color as a design statement when budget was a factor.  Painting a room bright green and doing some inexpensive furniture will lend personality – that is an easy way of creating a dramatic effect.  I’ve always been one to love drama and that sort of thing.  But in my office we have an ability to edit color well so that it’s not too over the top.

We’ve had some really wonderful clients that we’ve worked with for several years now that love color.  It’s almost as if there’s not enough color for them in the whole world.  We have done two projects for them and we have used every color in the spectrum.  I think that what we’re doing right now is literally a reaction to that.  When I think about it I say to myself, “I cannot use pink again.  I cannot use chartreuse anymore.”

JM: Because of those two large projects you just mentioned?

JJ: Yes, the two large projects that were color crazy.  And they’re wonderful projects, but I’m ready for some neutrals myself.

JM: Neutral tones?

JJ: I’m sure it’s a reaction.  Taupes and grays are all the rage right now – it’s very on trend to be working in those tones, so that’s part of it too.  But part of it is also that we’ve just been using so much color over the last four years, I’m ready for a break.

JM: On your website I really loved the bedroom – I think it was in your house – which was a pink – a lot of pink, with a portrait of Lincoln.

Bedroom by Jay Jeffers. Photography by Joe Fletcher.

JJ: Oh, yes.

JM: Who was the artist on that?

JJ: Natalie Amarato.

JM: I love that.

JJ: She does it in wallpaper too,  with repeating tones – it’s really fun.   That room was done in 2002, 2003, something like that.

JM: That was a while ago.

JJ: That was my signature, chocolate brown and hot pink.

JM: Okay!

JJ: So that must have been after the green, and then that turned into persimmon, and now it’s taupe.

JM: Now it’s taupe, okay.  Do you use your home as kind of a testing area?

JJ: I have in the past, definitely.  For ten years I lived in a 1915 Edwardian that had great bones to it, but the bedrooms could be changed easily.   I think I redecorated it, including painting the walls and wallpapering  three different times in those ten years.  But I just sold it last year.

JM: You sold it!

JJ: It’s not my study – it’s not my laboratory anymore.

JM: Where have you moved?

JJ: We’re in an apartment now, which is great, but very modern, very sleek, taupe.

JM: Taupe, or course!  Is that here in the city?

JJ: It is in the city, yes.  It’s fun.  It’s a high-rise, so it’s completely different, but it has great views and a very urban environment.  There is some persimmon mixed in with the taupe.  I couldn’t let it go completely…

JM: Napkins?

JJ: Yes.  But it’s good.

JM: Is it one of those apartments with lots of glass and grand views?

JJ: It’s right near Civic Center, and the living room has floor-to-ceiling windows, all glass, looking out onto City Hall.  So it’s kind of a little bit of a feeling that you’re in Paris – just a little bit.  So it’s fun.

San Francisco City Hall, circa 1940’s.

JM: Do you travel a lot?

JJ: A fair amount.

JM: Do you shop abroad?

JJ: Definitely.  We do a lot of buying in New York, LA and here, but we’ve worked with vendors in London and Paris and other parts of Europe as well.  It’s so easy to do now with everything that’s online, but it’s nice to be able to go and see these vendors and galleries in person as well.

JM: Do you have favorite vendors and galleries that you return to time and time again?

JJ: We do.  In LA we work with Downtown quite a bit, Modern One, Blackman Cruz, they all do really wonderful things.  In New York Van den Akker is one of my favorites.  Who else do we work with there?  Maison Gerard.  There are several in NYC – Wyeth, Donzella, to name two.

Fine Square Art Deco Stool by Louis Sue (1875 – 1968) and Andre Mare (1885 – 1932).French, circa 1925. Available at www.maisongerard.com

JM: And what about internationally?  Do you source furnishings from France or Belgium or –

JJ: We’ve done some work with Vervoordt, but I don’t know if it was Belgian furniture.  It might have been accessories and things like that.

JM: But you got some furnishings from that showroom?

JJ: Yes.  There are some beautiful Royere pieces and things like that that we’ve worked with from galleries from Paris, but there’s no one specific gallery that we gravitate towards.

JM: You don’t have a market in Paris that you go to or anything like that?

JJ: No.

JM: Do you go to the Alameda Flea Market at all?

JJ: I haven’t been in a while.  Once in a blue moon.  I used to go every Sunday.  I feel like it’s changed though.  So many people who were selling at venues like that or had small antique shops are selling now on eBay and probably doing better than they would at a flea market.  I feel like the quality has changed a little bit in those areas.  I used to be able to go and find really wonderful things.  Maybe my taste has evolved as well.  I used to go and find really wonderful things, and now when I go I might find three or four things – once in a while.

JM: Do you find things on eBay?

JJ: Sometimes.  We use 1stdibs constantly.

JM: You had a nice interview on 1stdibs.

JJ: Yes.  We use them constantly though.  1stdibs has changed the way designers do business completely.

JM: Interesting.  I don’t know very much about that business and I’ve never gotten anything from them.  Is it similar to eBay, or how does it work?

JJ: Dealers basically pay 1stdibs to be on their website, and then you can go and sort however you want, either by region or by piece or whatever.  You can buy through 1stdibs if you want, but we always go directly to the dealer because we already have relationships with them.  It’s a great way of finding new dealers.  If there’s somebody I haven’t heard of I’ll go to their shop in New York when I’m out there.

JM: Did Blackman Cruz close their gallery here?

Bronze Snake Chair by Blackman Cruz

JJ: They did, but their line of furniture reproductions are going to be represented by Coup d’Etat.

JM: Now on to another topic: when you do something like creating the design for the Celebrity Retreat up at the Screen Actors’ Guild Awards, does that translate into more work?  Was that a surprise to be selected for that, or how did that process work?

JJ: That was when I first opened the office in LA.  I was working with a publicist then, who is still my publicist, and I don’t remember how exactly that came about.   They contacted the publicist and had seen my work, or something like that.  It was really fun.  Did it transfer to anything specifically?  No it didn’t, but it was, you know…

JM: Fun hanging out with the stars?

Jay and Debra Messing at the SAG Celebrity Retreat

JJ: Really fun, taking pictures with all the celebrities that I loved! It was a lot of work, but we had a great time doing it.

JM: Was that retreat only for one night during those awards?

JJ: One night.

JM: One night only!

JJ: Well, I think it was two or three nights total.  Our room was next to where all the celebrities came to choose all their gifts for their gift bags, and we had the little retreat set up where everybody hung out and had something to eat or drink, and it was mostly just furniture.  All the sunglasses and jeans, all the celebrity scwhagg, was right next to us.  Of course there was a photographer so they would try on their sunglasses and have their pictures taken and all that kind of stuff.

When they would come in to rehearse their announcements or presentations, they would come and do their thing, and then the night of the awards, everybody came through to hang out.  It was up there for a couple of days, and it was definitely a quick turnaround.

JM: Quick turnaround, yes.  Do you have clients that occasionally come to you and say, “I have a 10,000 square foot house and I need you to furnish the whole thing in two months…”?

JJ: We’ve definitely been approached to do really, really fast projects.  We try to be as realistic as possible because we would rather take our time.  We’ll do it if somebody says we need this done.  That kind of job involves a lot of antiques, which we love, but it also involves going to retail stores and buying things super fast.  We might try to ask for three months instead of two months, to be able to find quality pieces.  We want to create things that last.

JM: Right.  Well, I’ve observed different designers getting press for that approach, and I’m just wondering how that works out in reality.

JJ: The reality is if somebody really wanted us to do it, we would.  But typically people come to us because they want and understand quality.   Many clients come to us that have worked with other designers before and have not been satisfied.  They understand what they want and what they’re looking for and they get it with us.  Then we also have a lot of people they haven’t worked with designers and we have to help them understand the process.  In the beginning they’ll say things like, “What?  This is going to take four months?”  We have to tell them that it takes a month to design, a month to price and four months to fabricate, which means that it will be six to nine months before they have anything.  But six to nine months in the grand scheme of the world…

JM: Is very fast.

JJ: It’s nothing.   We go through design development, we present everything, we’re very efficient at presenting it, clients usually love it, we may have some things to change around, we price it all, we get everything ordered, and then we send that out to them.  While everything is being made we go in for remodeling, wallpaper and paint, and by the time we finish that, the furniture is there and in it goes.

We can find accessories, artwork – we will make it completely turn-key.  If the client comes to us and says, “I want to bring my clothes and my toothbrush and move into my house,” we’ll take care of it.  We will outfit a kitchen down to the dishtowels, glasses, china, everything.  We will take it as far as a client will let us take it.  We will create their home for them.

Place setting for Gump’s Chinoiserie event in support of the 2010 San Francisco Fall Antique Show.

JM: And do you like that whole process?

JJ: Oh, I love it, it’s fun.  It’s great going and picking out china and silver for somebody else, you know?

JM: That does sound like a lot of fun.  In terms of providing a complete service, do you have jobs where people just come to you directly, that then evolve to the point where an architect, structural engineer, or a builder may be required?  Or do most of your jobs originate with the rest of the team already in place?

JJ: It’s probably half and half.  They come from everywhere.  Once in a while a builder will come to me and say, “I have a project I’m working on that needs a designer.” Sometimes the architect will come to me with a project, or the client will come to us first and we’ll build the team.  I’m guessing, but it’s probably half and half.

JM: Do you have a typical size project?

JJ: Well, I tell clients that my minimum is $100,000.00 because I think that that’s the size project where we can make an impact.  We may not be able to do everything and it really depends on the scope.  Size-wise it really doesn’t matter.  If somebody comes to me and says, “I have a two-bedroom apartment, can you do it?” our answer will be “yes,” if there’s a reasonable budget.  If they tell me they have $10,000.00 to spend, then I’m just not the right person for them.

JM: Do you try to give people a sense about costs for furnishings and finishes, etc., beforehand?

JJ: I will try.  It varies so much that I don’t like to.  Everybody asks, and everybody says, “I won’t hold you to it, but can you just give me a ballpark?”

JM: Then they usually want to hold you to it, don’t they?

JJ: Yes.  So I try not to give ballpark figures, but I look at our projects and what we’ve done in the past, and there is a range of square-foot costs.  I’ll talk to people about those costs if they’re really unclear on where they’re going, bug I also would rather have them tell me, “This is what I’d like to spend. Is that realistic?”

Often it’s a game because they’re probably going to tell us less than what they want to spend, and we’re probably going to tell them they need more, but at the end of the day, we are really flexible.  I always suggest that we design it the way the client wants it and then we can back up if need be.  If we double the budget, then we’ll either eliminate things or we’ll change things or we’ll phase the work over a period of years instead of doing it all at once.

It really depends on the house, too.  If someone tells me they’re planning to stay in their house for two years, then I will not design a built-in bed that will cost them thousands of dollars that they won’t be able to take with them.  But if someone says, “This is my forever house,” then I want to design it as if it’s a forever house.

Custom bed by JDG.

JM: Do people ever ask you about construction costs, say, for example, if they’re remodeling a kitchen?

JJ: If they’re remodeling a kitchen or a bathroom and I feel like I can speak in an educated manner on that respect, but when you get into anymore than that, that’s not my expertise.  We need a contractor in here to talk about that.

JM: Do you have contractors that you can call to discuss realistic construction costs?

JJ: Yes.

JM: It’s good to have that backup.

JJ: Yes.

JM: I’ve heard different rules of thumb for interior design.  I’ve heard $150.00 a square foot, I’ve heard 20 percent of the value of the house, and I’ve heard 50 percent of the value of the house.  Do you have a conversation with people and say, “You know, the cost could be anywhere, but if you find yourself below this level, it’s probably not a good fit for us?”

JJ: Right.

JM: If people have a budget that’s maybe not totally great, can you say,  “Well listen, we’ll do this, but we’re not going to be able to do the whole house,” or, “That’s the kind of budget that you could expect for a master bedroom and finishes in the foyer,” or something like that?

JJ: Yes.  I’ll tell them what I think we can achieve with their budget.  I met with a really nice guy last week in Burlingame.  I had gotten the feeling over the phone that we probably weren’t the right fit.  But I went down there anyway because he was a nice guy, and you just never know.  Especially during my early years,  I’ve taken projects on where I would think, “Oh my gosh, what am I going to do with this?”  Some ended up being fantastic projects.  So I met the guy in Burlingame, I gave him a number, and then I asked, “Does this scare you?” and he said, “Yes.”

So I said, “So, we may not be the right fit, but you think about it and come back to me and tell me what you can spend and I’ll tell you what I think I can do for that.”  If the budget’s not there, then everybody is going be unhappy.  The client will end up paying me a lot more money than they want before they even see results, because we get paid an hourly rate for design development.  If we go through design development, and then the client says, “Well, I just can’t afford this,” then at least they’ve got a design that they take with them, and I haven’t done all the work for free.  But that doesn’t really happen anymore.

JM: Right.  Does design development involve collecting and curating many different fabrics, finish samples, and color schemes?

JJ: Yes.

JM: So you’ll give people story boards where you’ll say, “This is the palate for the dining room.”

Pacific Heights Dining Room by Jeffers Design Group. Photography by Matthew Millman

JJ: Yes.  We will pull together floor plans – and in some cases we’ll do perspective drawings and things like that – but we’ll pull together floor plans and then have a big meeting with furniture pieces, floor plans, design concepts, fabrics, colors, wall finishes, wall coverings, everything.  We have one big meeting to present everything because I feel like people need to see all of that and take it all in.

Sometimes it’s overwhelming for a client, but I think that’s also good too because it shows them how much is involved, that it really is a very involved process.  I’ve never had a client that didn’t like any of it.  Usually they’ll say, “Okay, I love this.  I love this color.  I love this furniture and I love these fabrics.” If I don’t feel like they go together, I’ll suggest pulling together a new scheme using the fabric scheme for the master bedroom instead of the living room, or that sort of thing.  So it kind of evolves from there.

JM: Do you take notes and document all the decisions?

JJ: Yes.

JM: And then you somehow magically remember it?  That’s a lot to keep in your mind.

JJ: It used to be all here (points to his head), but it’s not anymore.  Other people write things down now.

JM: Good idea.  Well, do you have anything on your horizons about maybe publishing a book, or TV shows or anything like that?

JJ: No plans for TV shows.  I would love to publish a book, but I don’t plan to do that in the immediate future.  Maybe I’ll look into that next year, I don’t know.

JM: OK.

JJ: We’re thinking about furniture lines and fabric lines and that sort of thing.  That’s always in the front of my mind and it’s getting closer to the front.

JM: In the eternal hopper.

JJ: Yes.

JM: Well, that would be fun.  Is that custom wallpaper in the bathroom there?

JJ: It is custom wallpaper, but it’s not from here; it’s Jed Johnson.

JM: I was wondering about that because I saw the two Js.

JJ: Since it has two Js, it was too perfect not to put it in!

JM: And is Jed Johnson the wallpaper designer then?

JJ: He is an architect slash interior designer.

JM: Okay.  Well, I think on that note, let’s just close.  I want to thank you once more for your time.  It’s been a pleasure talking to you!

JJ: My pleasure.  It was fun.

Pacific Heights home by Jeffers Design Group. Architecture by Mark English. Photography by Matthew Millman

Interviewer: Jill Moran

Jill Moran is a construction professional with 20 years of varied experience in high-end residential remodeling. Her recent entry into motherhood, timed precisely with the downturn in the local construction industry, has resulted in a slight re-engineering of her career. She currently works closely with the management team at Mueller Nicholls, with an emphasis on communicating to the world at large about residential remodeling.

Jay Jeffers

to read Part 2

Jay Jeffers has had an absolutely meteoric career arc in the world of interior design.  One glance at the “Editorial” section of his firm’s website says it all: close to 100 articles, quotations, mentions, and features, over just a twelve year period, revealing a well-deserved love-affair with the media. And what’s not to love?  His interiors are always fresh, using the entire range of colors and palates, from vibrant and bold to elegant and subdued.  In person he is warm, witty, and engaging, and has the ability to immediately connect with whomever he’s with.  Join Mueller Nicholls and Jay Jeffers for an in-depth conversation about everything design.  Enjoy!

JM: I’d like to just start by thanking you so much for joining us.

JJ: It is my pleasure.

JM: Let’s start by talking about what drove you to design.

San Francisco living room by Jeffers Design Group. Photgraphy by Matthew Millman.

JJ: Well, design is actually a second career for me.

JM: Right.

JJ: I have a degree in international business, but I’ve always been creative and done creative things.  So I thought that my path was going to be advertising.  I did work for a small advertising agency for a while, and I thought that I would eventually own my own ad agency.  I moved to San Francisco and worked for The Gap in their corporate headquarters.  I soon realized that the corporate world was not the place that I wanted to be.  It was a very finite group of people that worked in the creative field, and then everybody else supported them, including me.  I was more on the account management side of things.

At some point I decided to take a class just to get my creative juices flowing again.  There was an Introduction to Interior Design.  That was always something I had loved –I’ve always read all the magazines, I had started getting architectural digest when I was about 12, and I rearranged my room when I was a teenager

JM: Were you a serial re-arranger?

Living room by Jeffers Design Group. Architecture by House and House. Photography by Matthew Millman

JM: Absolutely.  There were only four walls and about five pieces of furniture, but I explored every possible combination.  I painted it and I was always working on it.  So I took this class, and I just loved every aspect of it: the architecture, the history, the materials, everything.  We of course had a final project where we had to design a room, and I loved every minute of that.  So I started doing a little research.  I had a friend who was a designer and I worked for him for a while to see if it was something that I could actually make a living at.  I quickly realized that it probably was.  That was right at the beginning of the dot-com boom and I worked for him for four years before I went off on my own.

JM: Who was that?

JJ: Richard Witzel.

JM: Is he here in San Francisco?

JJ: He has since retired.  He has a furniture showroom.  He was a designer, opened up a retail store on Sacramento Street and had that for several years, and then opened up a showroom at the design center representing a couple of furniture lines.  And he still has that, but it’s run by a business partner.  He’s living in Palm Springs and doing a project here or there I think, but just enjoying life.

JM: Was he a mentor for you?

JJ: Oh, absolutely.  He took me completely under his wing. I started out working for him for free.  He knew nothing about marketing; he was just the creative kind of guy.  So I helped him in the marketing and public relations area, and he took me under his design wing.   He took me to client meetings, he took me to installations, he took me fabric shopping.  We would go oogle and oggle in the fabric rows because he loved fabric.  We would be going through the fabric and something that we both loved would pop up, and we would both be like, “Ooh!”  You could hear us in the showroom.  It was a lot of fun.  We had a great time doing it.

JM: And did he do mostly residential work?

JJ: It was all residential, yes.

JM: And is that mostly what you do too?

JJ: Yes.  I’ve done a little bit of restaurant work in the past.  I’ve two spas – Spa Radiance here in the city, and then I did a Spa actually in Florida, but that’s it.  I’m passionate about residential work.  I love getting into the clients’ heads, and I love creating wonderful things that are classic or contemporary, but great quality that will last forever.  And I love seeing a house, after I’ve done it, going back a year later and seeing it as a living, breathing, entity that people are living in and loving.

Spa Radiance designed by Jeffers Design Group. Photography by Matthew Millman

It’s immensely satisfying to see it like that because when you’re working on it, it’s a project.  It’s a job and you’ve gotta get it done, it has to be great, and you have to make the clients happy.  After a house is finished and you come back and see it, it’s like, “Oh wow, my work is done.  This is now a living, breathing sort of thing.”

JM: Do people call you back for follow-up touches here and there?

JJ: Oh, yes.  Our clients are clients for life, that’s for sure.

JM: How do you manage that?

JJ: We do whatever they want.

JM: That’s pretty good service.

JJ: We figure it out.  I have clients that move and want to reuse furniture and do things differently, or they buy second homes or other things come up.  Unfortunate things in life happen.  I have clients that have gotten divorced and lost half their furniture and moved, and we’ve had to deal with that.  We just make it all work.  We figure out how to make it all work.

JM: I’ve noticed that in the high-end interior design, there’s a very high level of service.  It’s a service industry –

JJ: Totally.

JM: It’s almost like a concierge level of service.

JJ: Yes.

JM: Why is that do you think?

JJ: Well, I think interior designers are looked at as taste makers.  We have clients that have very good taste, but oftentimes we also have clients who have very busy lives and they know what they like, but they don’t want to pick it themselves.  They will look to us to create style, to take their sensibility and their personality and make it stylish.  So it’s just natural for us to be the ones that they call on for a great florist, or a fabulous restaurant that they need or a caterer for entertaining or that sort of thing.  It doesn’t surprise me.  It is a very personal, emotional relationship.

When we’re working on projects where there’s an architect and a landscape architect and a contractor and a structural engineer and all that, clients tend to end up looking toward the designer for answers because that’s the relationship that gets developed the most.  With other professional it’s sort of black and white, cut and dry.  But with designers it’s a little bit more organic.

JM: I’ve also noticed that the world of interior design and the world of fashion seem to overlap quite a bit, pretty directly.  Has it always been that way?

Sketch from Peter Som’s fall collection, showing persimmon orange, one of Pantone’s Fall 2011 colors

JJ: I think it probably has.  I’ve never really studied it, but take color trends as an example.  Either interior design follows fashion or the other way around, especially today where everything is so at your fingertips and right around the corner.  Everybody gets inspiration from everywhere.  It’s not just what you see locally anymore, it’s what you see everywhere you go, it’s what you see online.  Designers might go to a runway show and suddenly there’s a color or a texture or something that’s been used in the show that’s now in their line.

JM: Maybe because you’re providing services that are very holistic in nature, fashion is just part of the whole shebang.

JJ: Yes, absolutely.

JM: Do you think that interiors are becoming more of a fashion statement?

Living room by Jay Jeffers. Photography by Joe Fletcher.

JJ: Yes and no.  Trends are so quick to change, which can make it very easy for someone to do their house and then decide in two years that they don’t like it and they want to do it over again.  We try not to engage in that.  We certainly look at trends and will infuse that into our design, but we try to do things that are a little more classic.  Maybe there are elements of it that might need to change over time because it might feel dated.  But we strive for design that does not need to be redone in two years.  We try to create furniture pieces and things that could be reupholstered, for example, but we try not to succumb too much to what’s trendy today.

JM: Can you give an example of something that is trendy right now that maybe you’re not using but that you’re getting asked for?

JJ: Well, the whole industrial look is really hot right now, and –

JM: I was wondering about that.  The light bulbs, right?

Steel and glass light fixture by Michael McEwen at the 2009 Metropolitan Home San Francisco Showhouse Great Room and Loft

JJ: Steel and light bulbs and all that, which we have used, absolutely.  But we call it our industrial chic look, and we’ll use light fixtures or maybe a lamp or two.  But it’s not an entire interior.  Five or ten years from now, it can be changed pretty easily.  It won’t be a matter of redesigning an entire home where the rooms are covered in steel that’s rusting.

JM: Do you feel that other interior designers respond more to trends?

JJ: Some do.  There are some designers in the industry that are very trendy.  That’s their look, and they don’t really stray from that look.  There are other designers that have been in this industry forever that do wonderfully beautiful and classic interiors that will stand the test of time, and that’s what they’ve always done.  I was just talking to somebody the other day about this topic.  I think it’s easier probably for someone to get business and maintain business that’s really known for one look.  I think that we’re not really known for one specific look.  If you ask somebody on the street that knows design, they probably would say that we’re crazy color and pattern mixture and that sort of thing, and if you look at our recent work, that’s not really correct anymore.

Master bedroom at 2010 Elle Décor Showcase House by Jeffers Design Group. Photography by Matthew Millman

JM: Right.

JJ: As a designer myself, I always want to evolve and change with the times to some extent.  That keeps it fresh for me too.

JM: Of course.  Have you ever seen an idea that generated from your office and then started a whole trend somewhere else?  For example, have any of your ideas ended up in Restoration Hardware catalogs?

2005 SF Decorator Showcase House by JDG. Photography by Matthew Millman.

JJ: I haven’t seen specific things, but I do think that I was probably on the cutting edge of using mid-century design and mixing the old with the new.  I was doing it quite a while ago when mid-century design was really, really inexpensive because nobody wanted it.  I was taking it and reupholstering it in fresh, new fabrics.  I wasn’t the only one doing it, but it certainly caught on a lot more over the next five to ten years to what it is now.

JM: Do you think that 50 years from now a 1950’s chair that’s upholstered in twenty-first century fabric will look like it comes from 2010?  Do you ever look at it in that way?

JJ: Yes.  I think that there will be things that reference the 2000s or the early 2000s or something like that, which will be mid-century references with updated fabrics and looks and that sort of thing.  Maybe they will be coming around a second time, or maybe by then people will be stripping all that off and making it look exactly the way it did in the 1950s.  Who knows?

JM: Very interesting.  So you grew up in Dallas, right?

JJ: Yes.

JM: Do you feel that Texas or the South had a big influence on you in terms of how you look at lifestyles?

JJ: Honestly?  Not really. I grew up in a very conservative household in a suburb of Dallas where I was exposed to everything Texan, and nothing else.  I had a stroke of luck when my mother changed careers from teaching to working for a software company.  Part of her job was traveling all over the world.  Every time she would come back, she would show pictures, and she would bring things that she had bought, and she was always very encouraging my brother and me to travel the world.  In fact, when I was in high school I came to San Francisco for the first time because she was here on a business trip.  When I was in college my freshman year I went to New York for the first time.  After being exposed to those cities, I knew that there was more our in the world than Texas.

JM: And I won’t be in Dallas forever!

JJ: Exactly!  Growing up in Texas, I was taught Texas history before American history, and that’s no joke.  Until I was 16 I thought that Texas was the only place in the world, and that everyone else was crazy.  The “yankees” in New York were nuts and all the Californians were on drugs.  That’s really what you’re taught, it’s sad to say.  I think Texas is different today.  I will say that Texans are the nicest people in the world.

JM: Oh, absolutely.

JJ: I can say that about Texans, but I do not need to live there.

JM: Yes.

JJ: It’s a nice place to visit.

JM: Do you remember coming to San Francisco and how different it was?

Painting by Judith Anderson:

JJ: I remember flying in here and taking a Super Shuttle to my mother’s hotel.  I can remember these people getting dropped off, and we were on a picturesque street.  We were on a steep hill – I was not used to hills because in Texas there are none – but they got off and they went into this Victorian and it was a real house.  I had been looking at San Francisco as if it was a drawing.  When they walked in the house I was said to myself, “Oh my gosh, people actually live here!  And if other people live here, I could live here too.”

JM: Did that plant the seed of moving to San Francisco then?

JJ: It did.  I knew in college that I was not going stay in Texas.  I just didn’t know if it would be New York or LA or San Francisco.  But I was in advertising, and San Francisco was a hotbed for advertising back then.  All the big agencies and all the great campaigns were coming out of San Francisco.  I also knew people that lived here, so those two factors outweighed the other cities.

JM: You may have said this already –you went to school in Texas.

JJ: In Austin, yes.

JM: Which is a really nice town.

JJ: Austin is a great place.  I love Austin.

JM: So then you moved to San Francisco?

JJ: Yes.

JM: Do you have any memorable ad campaigns that you were part of?

JJ: Well, I worked for a small agency when I moved here, and then I went to work for The Gap.  I started with The Gap is when the khaki campaign – the “Who wore khakis” –was just starting.

Gap ad from early 1990’s featuring Steve McQueen.

JM: When was that?

JJ: That was 1994 I think.  Then I went to work for the Old Navy division.  Old Navy didn’t exist when I started there, but it formed shortly thereafter.  I worked in PR and marketing.

JM: Is it a big shift to go from advertising to marketing?

JJ: It was.   We were the “advertising department” because we were the agency as well.  They didn’t have an outside agency.  I did a lot of the media relations and worked with the PR team on all of the store openings because we did grand openings for every store.  It was a fun time.  It was very energetic and exciting and there were fun people working in our department.  It was a huge company, but there were only about four people in the advertising department for Old Navy, so it felt like this tiny little startup.

JM: I’ve heard good things the Gap: good work ethic, not a ton of politics.

JJ: It was definitely political, but I think any corporation is political.  I was in my 20s when I worked there, my boss was maybe in her early 30s, and I think the VP was maybe in his mid 30s.  So it was a very young group.

JM: A youthful company.

JJ: We all worked really hard, and we all had a lot of fun too.  It was a great place to work.  Just walking into the lobby of The Gap and seeing the Fisher Collection that was there at the time, walking by Warhol’s James Dean every day when I got to work – that was a pretty incredible thing.  No matter how bad the day wasit was a fantastic place to work.

“Rebel Without a Cause” by Andy Warhol, 1985, Portfolio Screenprint on Lenox Museum Board.

JM: Have you always had a really strong emotional response to art?

JJ: Definitely.  I’ve always been attracted to it in one way or another, whether it’s painting myself, which I haven’t done in a long time…

JM: Did you paint when you were growing up?

JJ: When I was younger, yes.  I grew up taking art lessons and painting and drawing, but I kind of got out of it in high school and college.  I was into music and singing and that sort of thing, so that’s where I concentrated my creative endeavors.

JM: What kind of music were you singing?

JJ: I was in a jazz choir when I was in high school.

JM: Nice!

JJ: I sang a lot of jazz tunes and show choir.  We were very – we were not Glee, but we wanted to be Glee.

JM: Excellent.  That’s very nice.

JJ: And I did the same thing in college.  I was in a much larger show choir in college and we did a few shows and it was fun.  It was a lot of fun.

JM: Do you sing at all now?

JJ: No, only in the shower.

JM: What about painting?

JJ: Not at all, but I don’t miss it.  I feel like I have a creative outlet and it’s design.

Please stay tuned for part two – where we find out what it’s like for Jay to run his own business, where he sources his fabulous furnishings, and what Jay has in store for future projects.

Kathleen Navarra

JM: I would like to start the interview by thanking you for joining us. We’re here with Kathleen Navarra and Navarra Designs, and we’re very pleased that we have an interview with you. Can we start by talking about your early influences that led you to design and why you ended up in design?

KN: Well, it’s kind of a funny story. I was a teenager and my neighbor was a designer. She took me to a jobsite, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever, and I went home and said, “I’m going to be a designer!” My parents were a little curious, since I had never taken an art class or anything like that. I did crafty things, like building dollhouses, but I didn’t take any art classes in school. It really didn’t interest me. But I saw that jobsite when I was 16, and I said, “Wow, this is so cool.”

Napa exterior by Navarra Design. Photography by Gary Crawford.

JM: What do you think attracted you to what she was doing? Did it seem glamorous?

KN: No, it was a jobsite. I saw her create space and I thought, “Now, that’s really, really cool.” But I didn’t know anything about architecture and design; I just knew that she was an interior designer. My parents also didn’t know anything about that world. Literally, they were like, okay, all right. And I kind of let it go but thought, “Well, I’m going to go to design school in New York.” We lived in Florida, at the time. We moved from New York to Florida.

JM: That’s a big change. Why did you move?

KN: Well, my dad always loved it there, and he just always wanted to go to Florida.

JM: Were you born in New York?

KN: Yes. Now only my parents and my brothers are in Florida. Everybody else is still in and around New York, Long Island, all over. I told them that I wanted to go to design school when I graduated from high school. They said, “You’re not going back to New York!”

JM: Really? They didn’t want you to go back to New York? Why?

Panoramio, a site installation at the Pratt Institute by Matt Fenton

KN: My father said, “We took you out of New York. Why do you want to go back there?”

JM: Why didn’t he like New York?

KN: He just thought Florida was such a much better place to be, and New York, at that time, was a lot more dangerous.

JM: So they were concerned about danger, maybe the weather…

KN: New York was a dangerous place, and I kept telling him I wanted to go to Pratt, which was in Brooklyn, in a very bad neighborhood. I mean, literally, they have lockdown at 10:00, and I was intent on going there. My dad said, “You’re not going.” They were adamant. So I decided to go somewhere else, and I went to school in Manhattan.

JM: At the New York School of Design.

KN: New York School of Interior Design. Yes, and I loved it!

New York School of Interior Design in Manhattan

JM: That’s so great.

KN: It was just one of those things. My parents probably thought I was just going to go and either love it or hate it. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And it was a long road; it was a five year program. It was pretty intense.

JM: What was the curriculum like?

KN: Well, students had a choice. I did a lot of construction and I did a lot of architecture within the program. With the shorter programs, those courses weren’t offered; they just offered some interior design and decorating.

JM: So you spent time learning construction details?

KN: Yes. We did construction documents, and that part fascinated me. But no one ever suggested that I go to architecture school. Once I even had a counselor tell me that architecture was not for girls.

JM: Oh dear.

KN: My, how times have changed.

JM: Wow. So you inquired about it, and …

KN: She was an art teacher who was also a counselor, and she said, “Women don’t go into architecture.”

But architecture is for girls!

JM: What did you think when she said that to you?

KN: I thought, “O-kay…” She said, “She’s an interior designer-” (I was telling her about my neighbor), “Why don’t you pursue that?” I just didn’t know, and I knew that my neighbor was an interior designer, and that seemed good. So that’s what I did, and I loved it, I did, I just loved it. It was fascinating. It was great to be in New York, it was a very international school, with a lot of kids from Europe and Asia, so it was interesting. Grueling, but interesting. It was tough. New York is expensive and I worked two jobs.

JM: Two jobs while you were going to school.

KN: Yes.

JM: That’s a lot.

KN: It was New York. So I never got to live there and really enjoy it. It is just one of those places that is very difficult to live in if you’re not making money.

JM: It’s a struggle.

KN: Yes.

JM: Renting a closet somewhere for a “bedroom”.

KN: Yes. I slept in a something we called it “the coffin.” I slept in a trundle bed my first year, literally, a trundle bed on the floor in a one-bedroom apartment. I had a roommate, and that was all we could afford. But what did I know? I was 18 and 19, and I was excited to be on my own.

JM: It’s great that you followed your inner voice and not your parents’ voice.

KN: I know. They were thrilled. Once they saw that I was thriving and I really did have an interest in it, they relaxed. But they really just couldn’t believe it because I had showed no interest at all in art or anything. It would have been one thing if I was a kid that was always in art classes, but I wasn’t. I was building dollhouses.

JM: Actually building them is a little bit different than what most children do with dollhouses.

KN: Yes. And then I worked for designers through school.

JM: Did they have an internship program there and a close connection with the design community in New York?

KN: No, not really. The summer I started, a job posting went up on the board, which I applied for and got. Then the following semester, one of the women in my drafting class offered me a job based on my drafting skill. She had her own firm and she was just taking some courses to brush up on things. She asked me to help her with drafting projects for her business.

JM: Wow, that’s great.

Historic Piedmont Residence dining room by Navarra Designs. Photography by Matthew Millman

KN: I wound up working for both of them throughout my schooling. I was lucky because they were both very flexible about my hours. I worked for one a couple of days a week and the other three days a week. It was great!

JM: Are those firms still in business?

KN: One is. Now she’s in Connecticut, but she’s scaled back. She had her own family and her life changed greatly. I lost touch with the other woman. She had a family tragedy and she stopped communicating. She was so talented. I was lucky, they were both really wonderful women, wonderful mentors.

JM: What happened when you graduated?

KN: I fell in love and I followed my heart to Pittsburgh. Actually, that was the best thing that ever happened to me; I had two of the best jobs.

Pittsburgh, circa 1902

JM: In Pittsburgh?

KN: I know, right?

JM: You don’t usually associate Pittsburgh with a mecca of design.

KN: Well, they have all those Carnegie Mellon grads.

JM: True story.

KN: There was this one place that I interviewed with before I moved, and I walked in, and thought, “This place is unreal!” It had really great, tall ceilings, brick walls, and they had all these sketches all over. I really wanted to work there. They didn’t have a job, but I met the principal. They were design fanatics, and he just loved me. He liked my experience, but there were no openings. P.S.: One year later, he called me and said, “I have an opening.” So I quit my job at a large firm and I went and worked for him. He gave me quite the chance. I really owe him a lot.

JM: Who was he?

Charles Luke Desmone

KN: Charles Luke Desmone, of Charles Desmone and Associates Architects. He always hired young talent from Carnegie Mellon. I worked with some of the best people, just unbelievable minds. It was so exciting. And I was an interior designer, so they tortured me.

JM: They tortured you. What forms of torture did practice?

KN: They made me cry, often.

JM: Did they really?

KN: Yes.

JM: Why?

KN: Because, here they were in this hot little firm with all these architects and they couldn’t understand why he hired me.

JM: Wow.

KN: “Interior desecrator.”

JM: That’s what they called you?

KN: But now, they’re two of my best friends.

JM: The people who tortured you?

Charles L. “Chip” Desmone

KN: Yes. Well, actually, Chip, the owner’s son, really was the one who doled most of the torture on me. The other guys were, actually, really helpful. I mean, they gave me a hard time, but more jokingly. But Chip, he did torture me.

JM: And you held your own.

KN: At the end of the day, he made me a much better designer. They had me doing structural plans.

JM: Wow.

KN: I didn’t know anything about structural plans. Chip said, “If you want to do this, you have to learn.” And I said, “I want to do this.” He said, “Okay…” Of course I faced him. Our drafting tables were back to back, so I had to look at him all day. And I’d look up…

JM: You’d look at him and say, “I’m doing my structural plans, see? Here’s an I-beam, dammit.”

KN: Well, they gave me a chance, they really did. Chip’s father always said to him, “She won’t prove me wrong.” I had a lot of good experience by the time I got out of school, but then that job really set me in motion.

JM: How long did you work there?

KN: A little over a year, then I moved here. And by the time I got here, I had had such good experience. It was the end of 1990 and things were booming here. I had gone back to New York, and I had broken up with the boy.

JM: That happens.

KN: I wound up actually loving Pittsburgh, but I needed to get out of there. It was a bit of a struggle because I loved what I was doing, but I had no ties there at all. My boss wanted me to go to architecture school, but I decided to come here.

JM: Why San Francisco?

Pacific Heights living room by Navarra Designs. Photography by Matthew Millman

KN: Well, a lot of my New York friends were here.

JM: Really?

KN: They had moved here, and when I visited them, they would tell me that it was booming in SF, and that I should interview and get a job. New York was dead. So I did. I got a job and I moved a month later, and that was 20 years ago!

JM: Doesn’t time fly?

KN: Yes, it’s frightening to say that. It’s like, oh, I’m old enough to…

JM: It’s sobering, isn’t it? So it was kind of an economic decision to move here, but your friends were based here too.

KN: Yes – I had friends here, and I got a job.

JM: Where did you work?

KN: A small design firm, Charles Lester and Associates. The economy started to turn a year later and he started laying people off, so it was kind of a scary time.

JM: I remember those days.

KN: I was the last standing employee at that company. I lasted there for three years until I couldn’t take it anymore. And that’s when I started my own business.

JM: So was that 1993?

KN: Yes. I left. I took a big leap with one client.

JM: Wow.

KN: That was my first foray.

JM: Are you still in touch with that client?

KN: Yes I am, actually. I keep clients. A lot of my clients have been with me for a long time.

JM: Do you see yourself as having a trademark element or something that’s present in all of your designs that you developed?

KN: Color is one of our big things. People come to us for that reason. Many people are afraid of color, they’re afraid to use it. Generally, people need to be pushed to do it. But once they live with it, they can’t imagine living without it. That topic kind of segues into what Jeff and I are doing here. This April will be three years for our showroom!

Bath by Navarra Designs. Photography by Gary Crawford

JM: Congratulations.

KN: Thanks.

JM: It’s kind of a thrilling time to start a new business.

KN: Really. What have we done?!? Oh, but it’s been great. It’s been amazing. But to get back to color: We will always have color in here. You don’t really see a lot of color in retail shops. Having color here has been a real draw.

JM: Well, it is vibrating with color, but from my limited experience, they’re unusual colors. They’re not the colors that everybody is using, not necessarily the trendy colors.

KN: Yes.

JM: Why do you think you have a different take on color that’s more interesting?

KN: That’s a good question.

JM: Do you see that in yourself?

KN: We had an exhibition when I was in school, and this very famous designer requested an interview with me because of one of the projects I did. She said, “Your innate sense of color is remarkable. You were born with that.” I was 20 at the time, and it didn’t dawn on me that I saw things differently in that manner.

JM: Who was the designer?

KN: Barbara D’Arcy.

Barbara D’Arcy

JM: Barbara D’Arcy.

KN: She was an old timer. I don’t even know if she’s still alive. She was old then, and I was blown away.

JM: But she noticed your sense of color, even when you were in school.

Image from The Bloomingdale’s Book of Home Decorating by Barbara D’Arcy

KN: Yes she did. To me, color is the easy part. She said, “That’s innate. I’m telling you, that does not walk through the door every day.” I don’t know where that comes from, but for me, fashion is a huge influence.

JM: Oh, really?

KN: Huge influence.

JM: I can tell!

Vogue

KN: I’d much rather read… “Read…”(Uses hands to make quotations marks) I’d much rather look at fashion magazines.

JM: I’d rather look at Vogue.

KN: Me, too. I’d much rather look at Vogue.

JM: I read it for the articles!

KN: That’s right. (Laughs) They have articles. They try, actually.

JM: They do.

Hot pink, Spring 2009

KN: They do. I’m kind of impressed. But I do read fashion magazines. That’s kind of my guilty pleasure when I travel—I buy every last fashion magazine. That’s where I source a lot of my color. They’re ahead of the design trend, and that does influence me. The interiors business is very driven by that because a lot of it comes from Europe. Fashion houses start a trend, and then a year later, you’ll start seeing that color creep in to interior design.

Pantone color of the year… 2011

JM: Do you pay attention to those trends, the rise and falls of colors and their migration around the globe?

KN: No, it’s more like I get captivated by certain things. I’ll see a dress and say, “Isn’t that fantastic?” Then I realize I’m using that color all year, and then I get bored with it a year later, and then I’ll see it all over the design magazines again. So I don’t really do color forecasting – at least it’s not something I’m really conscious about, I just do it.

Prada Dress

JM: Do you have some favorite designers?

KN: I probably have more favorite architects.

JM: Oh, really?

KN: Robert Stern and Michael Graves were probably my big influencers in school, which is interesting. I think that was largely because I loved the construction aspect of it. To me, they are two of the best interiors architects. A lot of architects aren’t good at interiors. Robert and Michael know how to do interiors. They know how to lead you through a space and transition through the space brilliantly. I used to attend every Michael Graves lecture I possibly could when I was in New York. I was completely gob- smacked. To me, he was the quintessential renaissance architect. He would even work with color! The man’s not afraid of anything.

JM: So he was an architect who used color.

Pacific Heights Living Room with bench by Kathleen Navarra. Photography by Matthew Millman

KN: Yes. Luis Barragán was also one of my favorites. He used color. All my favorites are architects. I never really thought about that.

Pool by Luis Barragán

JM: Are a lot of the projects that you do in conjunction with an architect, or because you have that background, do you not rely on that as much?

KN: We don’t. I wouldn’t say it’s 50/50, since we do some projects with architects. But we tend to get a lot of kitchens and baths. We tend to do somewhat smaller projects, I think, and we do them ourselves.

JM: Do you do the plans yourselves?

KN: Yes, and we do all the construction drawings.

JM: Do you get the permits?

KN: Well, the contractor or the homeowner usually get the permit. If it’s a project that requires an engineer or an architect, we’ll get them on board. But for kitchens and baths, we usually don’t. We have this discussion constantly because working with more architects might bring larger scale projects. We do tend to get one-offs, although those often segue into other things. Sometimes a client will start construction and then decide to freshen up other rooms.

JM: Mission creep?

KN: Yes, absolutely. That has worked well for us. The fact that we do everything has gotten us through two downturns.

Piedmont living room by Navarra Designs. Photography by Matthew Millman

JM: You must have quite a bit of flexibility because I’m sure you have the capacity to do large projects.

KN: Yes, we do have that capacity, and we do take on large projects. We’re working on a couple right now, and that’s just the nature of what we do. People who have seen one of our kitchens often call us to do their kitchen. I enjoy it!

JM: One of the things that I love most about remodeling is creating a modern kitchen. It’s very satisfying.

KN: Yes. A lot of our clients cook, and I cook.

JM: Oh, really?

KN: It’s funny because I have a lot of clients ask if they should go to a kitchen designer. I tell them, “No, you don’t need a kitchen designer. I’m a kitchen designer.” It’s not all I do, but I do cook, and I think a lot of kitchen designers are people who don’t cook.

JM: Yes. People who don’t cook. There have been many kitchens that we have constructed that are not being used: State of the art, six-burner Wolf ranges…

KN: They’ve got it all.

JM: And it doesn’t get used.

KN: Yes. Most of our clients cook. It’s great, because we really have to plan everything down to the last detail. We have nice clients. We’re lucky. We have really nice clients.

Piedmont Kitchen by Kathleen Navarra Designs. Photography by Matthew Millman

JM: That’s great. May it ever be thus!

KN: Yes.

JM: Have you found a little bit of a downturn in your business in this economy?

KN: Yes. Things, we feel like things are picking up for sure, but it was a rough couple of years. Jeff and I opened our shop in April three years ago, and that fall, everything fell apart. However, right after we opened, in walked a woman who was our biggest client for the next year. She saw us setting up and she loved the aesthetic she came in and she hired us. Our shop has driven a lot of work our way.

JM: Is she a neighbor here, in this neighborhood?

KN: No, she’s one of those people that scours. She was potentially buying a house, and then, by the time they bought the house, we were open. She came in to talk to us about design services. We were thrilled! We’ve gotten some really good clients through our shop.

JM: How did you meet Jeff?

Jeff Holt and Kathleen Navarra at their showroom, JAK Home. Photography by Ed Ritger

KN: Jeff and I know each other from the industry.

JM: Oh, really?

KN: Yes. He used to be on the other side, on the showroom side.

JM: What showroom?

The Kneedler- Fauchère Showroom in San Francisco in the 50s. Jeff and Kathleen were but a twinkle in their parents’ eyes…

KN: Well, I, originally, met him at Kneedler-Fauchère a gazillion years ago. We became really good friends and he came to work for me eight years ago.

JM: Did he come to work with you before this showroom was open?

KN: Yes, we’d been working together at Navarra Design for years. And he and I had always talked about having a shop, in what capacity we weren’t really sure, but we had always talked about doing something. When he came to work for me, we were just really, really busy and we just wanted to make sure that Navarra Design was running really well. He’s been the general manager and it’s been great. Then we moved into this space, and it was just one of those things. We kind of happened upon this space. We weren’t really ready to move. Our lease at our place in South Park lease was going to be up. Two of our girls walked by here, both independently, at two different times, and both mentioned it. We thought, “Wow, maybe we should go and look at it.” So we did. We came one day and we were peaking through the door. As I was leaning on the door it pushed open. This woman comes around the corner, and we said, “Sorry!” We told her our story, and she said, “Come in, come in. I own the building and I just happened to be in town so I came by to see what was happening.” Jeff and I started talking to her, and we fell in love with her. She was just the sweetest woman. And then the story – she started telling us the story of this building.

JM: What was the story of the building?

KN: The story is that Julia Morgan moved her wood carver, Jules Suppo, here from Switzerland.

JM: Hence the carvings on the exterior, which are still here.

KN: He did all the carvings for San Simeon, and he carved everything from this space.

Balcony, corbels, frieze at exterior of JAK Home, all carved by Jules Suppo. Photography by Sandy Wood.

JM: Really? Unbelievable!

KN: And he lived upstairs with his family.

JM: Wow.

KN: We said, “Okay, if this place doesn’t have good juju, we don’t know what does.”

JM: It is a really beautiful space. The ceilings are nice and high… Did Julia Morgan design this space, then?

KN: Yes.

JM: Did she design the whole building?

KN: Yes.

JM: So there’s a space upstairs?

KN: There’s an apartment, or two apartments – there’s one right above here, and then there’s a third floor, I think, that got added I don’t know when. We’ve never actually seen it, but it looks a little rigged.

JM: As many third floors in San Francisco do.

KN: And then, when the owner was renovating the building, she had to bring some things up to code, and she built out the basement, and there’s a Pilates studio down there.

JM: That’s also really good juju.

KN: Yes. We worked with her to clean up the backyard so now we have access to that, which is so nice when we have nice weather. It is nice to be able to go out there and sit.

Wood mirror reflecting a scene from JAK Home. Photography by Jeff Holt

JM: This space seems to work really well for you, with the main part of the showroom up front here, and then the offices in the back.

KN: It’s really good. When we first moved in, we had this all as our office because we hadn’t opened the shop yet. People kept stopping and saying, “Oh, what kind of shop are you going to be,” because it’s a retail space. And we were like maybe we should do this. We were kind of ruminating about different ideas and we were like, you know what? Let’s do it.

JAK Home storefront

JM: You got some signs from the universe, then.

KN: Yeah, and we were like, let’s go. And we did it pretty quickly.

JM: How did you find your pieces that you have?

KN: Well, we work with some manufacturers, and we do a lot of found things that we reupholster. Take that chair: It’s an old chair, and that’s a Suzani we bought in Europe.

JM: Suzani, is that a type of tapestry?

KN: Yes. They are typically used as throws or rugs. They’re really popular right now. We got that one a year ago last September in Paris at a show, and even though it was a little sacrilegious, we cut it up and put it on the chair.

Suzani detail. Photography by Liz Hager

JM: And how about the artists on the wall? How do you find your artists?

KN: A lot of people come to us, which is kind of nice. We get a lot of solicitation, which is great.

JM: Really? That’s great.

KN: It is! For example, that artist has a shop just across the street.

JM: What’s her name?

White Ripples by Leigh Wells. Other pieces from this series are on display at JAK Home

KN: Leigh Wells.

JM: That’s an interesting combination. She’s starting with found objects and then making the modern.

KN: Yeah. She’s a very talented woman. She’s very talented.

JM: Did she solicit you or did you see her studio?

“Twin Peaks” by Larry Hatlett

KN: Actually, she had some pieces up at another little shop down the street, and she came in here one day, talked to Jeff, and said, “I’d love for you to show my work!” We also work with Michael Thompson Gallery, showing pieces like that one over there (points to photograph by Larry Hatlett). They have art and framing and we often get pieces from them. And this is Brad Huntzinger, who works out of Berkeley. Do you know Ironies?

JM: Ironies?

KN: Ironies is his furniture company. They’re based in Berkeley and he paints, and we just bought this from him.

JM: Is that also one of his pieces in that Napa Dining Room?

KN: No, that’s not his. To segue into art, a lot of our clients have art collections which we can pull from as we’re working. Like this job here has –

JM: This one here?

Napa dining room by Navarra Designs. Photography by Gary Crwaford

KN: Yes. They have great art. They have a house in San Francisco, and we re-did this house in Napa for them. She invited us to come to the SF house to source artwork for the Napa home. This dining room is very ethereal because of the way the light comes into the room. This photograph evokes exactly how that room feels when you are looking at it. We had to put that painting in there. That room always feels that way because of the way the light filters in.

Napa living room by Kathleen Navarra Design. Photography by Gary Crawford

JM: This is beautiful. The way it’s framed with the wide opening and the stairs going up and the simple casing at the top… The whole thing looks like a painting. And I can’t say why it looks like that, but it just looks like something I would have seen in the impressionist show in San Francisco.

KN: We did subtle color in there, keeping it fairly neutral. The rug provided the color in there.

JM: It is quite colorful. Well, to talk more about some of the compositions in your other rooms: I love this room and the way that the elements are all so disparate – the gargoyle and the blue lamps and this very ethereal etching and this beautiful light fixture. How did you create that? Is it hard to pull that all together, or was it very obvious to you?

Pacific Heights Dining Room by Kathleen Navarra Design. Photography by Gary Crawford.

KN: Things morph. It’s funny because we wind up starting with something like the lamps and then we kind of work around and through that. Our client had these (the etchings), and I always thought they would go in there because this room was just kind of neutral. We wanted these (the lamps) to be a hot color.

JM: How did you find those lamps?

KN: Antique shop.

JM: At an antique shop!

KN: Yes. It was kind of one of those things. Sometimes you set out to look for something, and other times, you’re just doing drive-bys and you’re like, “Oh my God, there it is!” That’s what happened with these.

JM: And were you looking for something in that kind of aqua tone or –

Pacific Heights Dining Room by Kathleen Navarra Design. Photography by Matthem Millman.

KN: We wanted that color because as you saw in this other picture over here – that’s her living room – the room between here and this room has a very traditional damask pattern of gray and this color (aqua). We wanted to carry that color through. This room had its punches of color, which you don’t necessarily see in the photos.

Pacific Heights Living room by Navarra Designs, photography by Matthew Millman.

JM: Is there a piano on the other side of this room?

KN: Yes.

JM: And the piano has an amazing painting above it that looks so great with the piano. And I’m also sure it looks really good across from this.

Pacific Heights Living room by Navarra Designs, photography by Matthew Millman.

KN: Yes. The birch is by Daniel Tousignant. I can’t remember who this artist is (pointing to abstract painting above fireplace), but Daniel is a local guy, and this painting was just so stark and so beautiful. Again, in this room everything was very neutral, and then we have these pops of color. This was actually a really bright purple (pointing to upholstery on the double benches), and then we have these orange and yellow throw pillows on the piano side.

JM: And there was a striped bench at the piano.

KN: Yes. Exactly. That was the one under the piano.

JM: Right.

KN: So again, there’s that little pop of color. When you come up the stairs, there’s that really traditional damask, but it looks really modern. We put a mirrored chest below it. We like to mix things; we like to mix it up when we can get our clients to do it.

JM: Do you have some clients that are hesitant to do a mix?

KN: Yes.

JM: I think there’s a lot in the media right now about mixing old with new and juxtaposition of disparate elements. I see that a lot in design magazines.

KN: Yes, that is true. I don’t think it always works.

Pacific Heights Living room by Navarra Designs, photography by Matthew Millman.

JM: Talented designers do it right.

KN: I think people are afraid of that because they don’t necessarily like it. Or maybe when I say “Antique,” or “Something vintage,” they think, “English” or “French Country.” Which of course is not what I mean at all. They’re just a little afraid because they’re not exposed to it. So it does depend on the client. We have a lot of young clients, and I think most of them are first time design users.

JM: What’s it like to work with that clientele, as opposed to a very experienced client, someone who’s done a lot of remodeling?

KN: There’s the time factor and the education factor. Experienced people are more trusting, maybe because they’ve already been through the process, so they’re a little more trusting of their knowledge, which makes them more comfortable. I’ll say, “Let’s make that cabinet red,” and they can say, “I’ve done painted cabinets before, so… I can go for that.” Someone who’s using us for the first time would respond less enthusiastically. But we do have a lot of first time designer users, and a lot of people with kids and dogs.

JM: And you have dogs in the office, so obviously you’re a good ally there.

KN: Yes. We have a lot of great clientele, and we do some really beautiful high end work. But for the most part, our clients live in their houses. We don’t do super precious design. Our design is livable, very livable. There are rooms, I think there’s one in Hillsborough…

JM: Is this the Hillsborough?

KN: No, that was the showcase house.

JM: This is a showcase house? Oh, I could not get over this room, and these wall coverings.

KN: I love that paper.

Pacific Heights Living room by Navarra Designs, photography by Matthew Millman.

JM: This wallpaper is remarkable! Tell us a little bit about that.

KN: That was the existing ceiling in there.

JM: Even the paint?

KN: Yes – it got cleaned, so it became a little bit brighter. And my jumping off point, there’s a little bit of this color (points to blue patent leather ottoman) in the ceiling.

JM: Oh, really? Oh, wow.

KN: You didn’t really notice it, of course, until you brought it down. And I kind of wanted the walls to be a little bit more modern looking, but with some color to it.

JM: Was this mirror or was this molding there?

KN: Yes, all the molding existed. It was a small room, but it was an incredible room.

JM: That’s a small room? It looks huge.

KN: Yes, well, compared to the other rooms in the house, I guess. I mean, it wasn’t tiny, but it wasn’t huge. It probably looks a little bit bigger than it was, but it opened on to the living room this way, and then it had eight-foot wide hallways, which was fantastic. And then there was that weird, weird bathroom, which was really difficult to photograph.

Pacific Heights bathroom by Navarra designs. Photography by Matthew Millman.

JM: So this is a bathroom that’s off of this room.

KN: Exactly. So this little piece is around that corner. That area had a dropped ceiling. Regarding this wallpaper (pointing to walls above vanity): I just wanted that room to have some movement. It was the oddest space. This little hallway here had 12 foot ceilings, and there was just a narrow hall going back to the toilet room, and then this other room was around that corner. It was just weird. The bathroom has a dropped ceiling. The connections between the rooms were really odd, so we really needed to do something interesting, almost to confuse people.

JM: You did mirrors…

KN: I did a mirror, I did wainscoting with the wallpaper below, and all of this was mirrored, the walls from here up to the ceiling. So it created this wild illusion. There was this snowy owl painting hung on the mirror, it was just wild. People walked in and they felt as if they were in a funhouse.

JM: Which showcase house is that?

KN: On Scott Street. I think we did this almost three years ago. In April, it will be three years ago. It was great. It just wanted it to be really sophisticated and it felt very swanky.

JM: That is very swanky. I love it.

KN: Many men said, “I want to smoke in here!” We said, “That’s exactly what we wanted, but you’re not allowed!”

JM: Well, and how about this ottoman, I like the definition between this, it looks almost like –

KN: It’s patent leather.

Custom ottoman designed by Navarra Designs. Photography by Matthew Millman.

JM: It’s patent leather and shiny, very modern.

KN: That’s what we do, humor with a twist.

JM: When was that furniture made?

KN: We found this company when Jeff and I were at a trade show, where there were a lot of French pieces. They had an ottoman similar to this. When we were bidding on the showcase home, I told Jeff that we had to have to have that ottoman and do something really modern with it. We ordered it and then we never heard from the company – they wouldn’t call us back. Nothing.

JM: You ordered it, including giving a down payment?

KN: No. They just said, “Send us 50 percent when we send you the confirmation.” Then they just wouldn’t call us back, and it was bizarre. I wound up designing another ottoman because they would never call us back, which is now in our shop. We’ve sold several of them. Then, a week before the showcase house opened, I was here late one night, and Fed-ex showed up at 7:30 at night, with a big box. It was the ottoman, not upholstered! I was so excited because it really was the quintessential example of Navarra design: A very traditional piece with a modern twist.

JM: It’s awesome. Are you doing the showcase house this year?

KN: Yes.

JM: You are? Are we allowed to say that on the interview?

KN: Yes.

JM: Which room are you doing?

KN: The living room.

JM: Great!

KN: Yes, it’s very exciting. Well, we thought about going for the kitchen – you know, you guys did the cabinets at the Sea Cliff kitchen.

Seacliff kitchen by Navarra Designs. Photography by Gary Crawford.

JM: And did we do the metalwork on this piece (pointing to pantry)?

KN: No, that’s John Haines. He’s up in Sonoma.

JM: How did you come up with the inspiration for seaweed? It’s a beautiful sculpture.

KN: That whole kitchen was based on being at the water. That’s their pantry. We did the floors in a limestone slabs cut into planks to resemble a boardwalk. That sandy color and the light blue were both very ocean-like. We were saying to ourselves, “What else, what else, what else?” I came up with the seaweed theme, so that’s what we did. We just drew it, and he made it.

JM: It’s a beautiful, artisanal piece of work.

KN: Yes, and it was a really simple frame. It was really only attached at the bottom, so the leaves were all kind of free-form. They stuck out from the glass.

JM: Did they wave a little bit since they’re not attached?

KN: Just a tiny bit. He welded some of them together so that they wouldn’t strike the glass.

JM: Does this piece still exist in that house?

Seacliff kitchen by Navarra Designs. Photography by Gary Crawford.

KN: We don’t know. She was our client for many years, and we had done many projects for her. Then she said, “Guess what? I’m going to buy a new house and it’s going to be the next showcase house!” We had done so many showcase houses, and they’re exhausting and they’re really expensive. But this turned out great. We had a great budget, and the kitchen was fantastic. We still get jobs from this kitchen, and that was eight years ago!

JM: Well, I also wanted to talk about this composition. I just love the way that this painting looks with this lamp and –

KN: I know. Sometimes, I just fall in love with a piece, like that piece. We have been told that there’s humor in our work, and I thought that piece was hysterical.

JM: Which one, the armoire?

KN: Yes. It’s very serious, yet it’s funny.

JM: Is it an armoire?

Pacific Heights living room by Navarra Designs. Photography by Matthew Millman

KN: It’s a liquor cabinet!

JM: It’s a liquor cabinet. That is hysterical!

KN: This guy is holding wine.

JM: He’s drinking, yes, but he does look very serious. This painting has a medieval quality to it.

KN: Yes. It was stunning, the piece was stunning. It was a show stopper.

JM: Where did you find it?

KN: At a local antique place. The proprietor probably still has it. People loved it, yet he couldn’t sell it to save his life. We thought we almost sold it a couple of times during the showcase house because people were very enthralled with it. It’s so interesting and these have handles, I think it used to be a tray.

JM: So you can take the door off and use it as a tray?

KN: No, but the door opens, it was hinged. This is all parchment. It was really beautiful. I had seen it in the showroom, and then when we were bidding on this room I thought, “That piece has to be in this room.” But it was low, it wasn’t very tall at all, so that’s why we wanted something above it.

JM: How did you find this lamp?

KN: We saw it somewhere. It’s one of those things where we find one piece, and that informs what the next piece is going to be. This was short, so we needed to do something that had some height and then we found this painting, which we loved.

JM: Is this also a local artist?

KN: Yes, he’s the same artist who did the birch trees that you love, Daniel Tousignant. We actually have a couple of his other paintings. He is so good, so talented. He does miniatures, too. One piece informs another. It’s never just the whole shebang, there’s always one piece that starts it off. This liquor cabinet did create some challenges because it was low and the ceilings were high. We also had this curtain that was draped from one side to the other in one asymmetrical swoop. We created this incredible drama in the room. And then, I put this low piece –

American Landscape, Two Trees of Life by Daniel Tousignant, oil on canvas, 2010

JM: It really grabs your attention.

KN: In fact, we just got a job from this.

JM: From this showcase house?

KN: Yes.

JM: Did someone see it on your website?

KN: No, she was there and she took copious notes and she called us toward the end of November. She was interviewing people that she had liked in that house. People hold on to those books, which is great. We’re a testament to the fact that it works. When we do something people respond to, people do take notice. People may not necessarily have a project at the time. This woman called us because she’s selling her house and buying another place.

JM: Does this wallpaper still exist in this house, do you know?

KN: Yes.

JM: It does? And did they keep any of your pieces?

KN: No. They didn’t even keep the draperies. The draperies were so wild.

JM: They didn’t keep the ottoman?

KN: No, but we sold that.

JM: You sold that right away, probably.

KN: We sold that ten times over. Everyone loves that.

JM: It’s so fun.

KN: One of my friend’s husband said, “Kathleen, you always do something incredibly memorable in your rooms. There’s always something that’s a little off.” I guess he’s right.

JM: Back to color, I thought this was an unusual color combination. I don’t know if you agree. I love it, but I don’t, necessarily, always see this kind of kumquat with olive, and yellow…

Hillsborough entry by Navarra Designs. Photography by Gary Crawford.

KN: Yes.

JM: It’s really beautiful.

KN: The owner of that house said she surprised herself because she never thought she’d be living in an orange living room. It’s such a beautiful room. This house was very beige when they bought it. All beige, white and black, and that was not her. She already had these (points to panels).

JM: What are these?

KN: They’re framed panels, and they’re French.

JM: Are they tapestries?

KN: No, they’re paintings.

JM: Are they antique paintings?

KN: Yes. These people have some incredible pieces. There really wasn’t any place else in the house for them, and there were actually four of them. I said, “Let’s have those be our jumping off point. Let’s put them in the entry.” They set the tone for the house, and that’s also where we pulled the color from. She was very, very adventurous.

JM: But even though this is kind of adventurous, it’s still muted. It doesn’t hit you over the head.

KN: No, that’s an accent wall and you don’t feel like it’s too much at all. Everything, it all flows.

JM: Is that something you strive for, to try to get things in a room to flow, and then to flow through a house, both physically and visually?

Hillsborough dining room by Navarra Designs. Photography by Gary Crawford.

KN: Yes.

JM: What happens to inhabitants when you don’t do that?

KN: I’m usually not there.

JM: You won’t visit those houses.

KN: People often start by having us decorate one room and then we move into other rooms. How do you do that? Easily. There can be a common thread, even if the next room is a totally different color. We always pull something from the room next to it. So you may not realize that there is that transition happening, but it is happening. Like with that entry color, that’s where we jumped off with that color.

JM: The kind of kumquat.

KN: Yes, we did a much more saturated tone in the living area.

Hillsborough living room by Navarra Designs. Photography by Gary Crawford.

JM: Oh, really?

KN: Yes. So there is this flow that happens, and then in the dining room, the walls are in that color (points to winged chair). So there is a flow that gets created.

JM: And is that something that was discussed during your training?

KN: Not so much. The woman that I worked for in New York (she really just did decorating) – that woman could do traditional work like nobody’s business. I think more than anything, she taught me about creating flow. I learned a lot from her. She used a lot of color. Her interiors were really traditional, very beautiful, and everything flowed beautifully.

JM: What do you mean by traditional?

Manhattan Living room by Mark Hampton, circa 1980. Photography by Thomas Loof

KN: Major florals, lots of antiques, chintz. I could do traditional work with my eyes closed in my sleep. To me, it’s so easy.

JM: Is traditional work less compelling to you?

KN: Not necessarily because I think traditional fabrics can be very colorful. I love pattern. We use a lot of pattern in our work. Even in a more clean contemporary space, we still have pattern, and lots of texture. We don’t just do clean, flat fabrics But there’s always a lot of texture. There’s a job that we’re going to get photographed soon, which has a lot of seemingly simple fabrics, not a lot of pattern, per se, but lots of texture and pops of color. But what was your question?

JM: Well, I hear people talking about “flow” a lot. Is it the kind of thing that if you do it too intentionally it gets too jarring or noticeable?

KN: I think people want that flow. There is a sense of being more comfortable when something flows. People complain about showcase houses because they don’t necessarily flow. Imagine that in your own house. The two rooms that don’t count are kids’ rooms and power rooms. There, you can do whatever you want. I’m doing two little girls’ rooms right now and we’re doing a hot pink wall, bright orange in the cabinets, and their parents like granite and beige. So this was a stretch. But they’re kids’ rooms. They don’t have to be like the rest of the house.

Children’s bathroom by Navarra Designs. Photography by Gary Crawford.

JM: How old are those kids?

KN: I think they’re 6 and 8.

JM: So pretty young. Did you go to the Elle Decor showcase house at all?

KN: I’ve only seen pictures of it.

JM: You saw the girl’s room there.

KN: Oh, Grant’s?

JM: Yes. It had a lot of color. Some of the work that has stood out the most to me at the various showcase homes has been the girls’ rooms. There seems to be something about the inner girl which really inspires a lot of flamboyance.

KN: You can have fun.

JM: Really throw in color.

KN: Well, I did that one kid’s room that got me a lot of work, actually.

JM: There’s a kid’s room on your website.

KN: We do a lot of kids’ rooms. At one showcase house that I did, Paul Vincent Wiseman said to me, “Well, tell me…” I said, “Kids need inspiration.” I grew up in a room with a red carpet and a yellow and white lacquer dresser. Some people believe that those rooms need to be quiet and calm, but I think kids need inspiration. That room had a green wall, striped wallpaper going horizontally around the room, blue and white drapes, and hot pink and green toile. And it was, it was fun, it was a really fun room.

Kids room detail

JM: Was he convinced?

KN: Oh, yeah, he loved it. Of course I was totally doe-eyed. I was thrilled.

JM: Of course! Tell me about these light fixtures here, which are similar to other cage light fixtures.

Lighting by Tracey Kessler

KN: Those are by Tracey Kessler.

JM: Tracey Kessler is the designer?

KN: She designed it. Do you know her? She’s a local designer. She won an international design award for that.

JM: For this light fixture?

Lights by Tracey Kessler

KN: Yes, several years ago now. People love it. It’s a show stopper. We had it in the front window for a while, and we sold it.

JM: Is that her work, too?

KN: No, that’s, actually a jet engine.

JM: Oh, that is so awesome. Who made that?

KN: Jeff and I found that in the Midwest at the Atlanta Gift Show last year. We do all our buying together. This guy had this great stuff. There was a whole vintage section.

JM: Had he already made it into a lamp?

KN: It was just like that. And he does all these great found item pieces of furniture. Those up there are old French baskets made by another source we met there, which are now all over. They’re in Restoration Hardware and Pottery Barn.

Lamp with vintage French basket shade available at JAK Home. Photography by Jeff Holt.

JM: I’m seeing this trend a lot now.

KN: I know.

JM: I describe it as being kind of warehousey and rustic, but still, very contemporary, with a lot of exposed light bulbs. When did you first notice this kind of an aesthetic?

KN: Well, Will Wick started doing a lot of that Restoration Hardware look years ago. And Tracey did this many years ago.

JM: Five or ten?

KN: No, no, maybe four. Then literally, just like last year, we started seeing a lot of that, especially the cage part. Jeff and I go to the trade shows and a lot of the companies are doing even little handheld ones or single ones and things that clip on with those old cages. Everything is very industrial.

JM: Why do you think this has so much cachet right now?

KN: I think it partially has to do with recycling. It’s all that old stuff finding new uses and making the look more modern and that (points to Tracey Kessler’s light fixture), certainly, looks modern. I love it.

JM: It’s very compelling and it’s just interesting to observe that more and more. I wonder how long that’s going to last. Which leads me to one of my other questions. So you have an office in New York?

KN: We don’t have a manned office. Before Jeff and I started this store, we were going back and forth and lot, doing a lot of work there. Then we kind of finished up, opened this, and stopped thinking about New York. It was just too much going back and forth. But we did pick up one job last year. When we start thinking about it, jobs start coming.

JM: Do you notice that there are different design fetishes on the East Coast and the West Coast? Are you seeing a lot of that in New York, too?

KN: Yes. There’s a lot more traditional, super-traditional, work there, (think Connecticut, for example), and we’ve done our fair share of that. In that respect, it’s different. New York just has that a huge outlet of traditional work. But again, there’s also contemporary work. We have a lot of clients that have lived here and moved back there, and that’s how we’ve done a lot of work there. The clients that we’re working with now love that Pacific Heights, clean, gray, look. That’s how we got hired; she saw that house when they had just moved there.

JM: The one with the kitchen?

KN: The one with gargoyles. So we’re taking a very traditional Connecticut house, with fairly clean lines, and we’re painting out some of the moldings and just making it a little more modern.

JM: How do you find time to do everything that you have to do, like the shopping? Skip sleep, no eating?

Wooden sculpture available at JAK Home. Photography by Jeff Holt.

KN: Well, Jeff runs the store, Jeff does all of this. All of this is him. Jeff can take three things and make it into the most amazing composition ever. It’s unreal. He’s great because he loves to move things around. I like putting them in the right place and just leaving them there. But he’s so – he’s super creative. We buy together, but he does all of this. It’s kind of morphed into taking over the shop, with the colors, all the fabrics, finding things… We’re learning. I think we’ve both worked retail, but we’ve never had our own shop, obviously. And it’s very different, it’s a different mindset.

Oil painting of pelican available at JAK Home. Photography by Oly Studio.

JM: Is it a steep learning curve?

KN: Well, we’re finding what sells and what doesn’t, and what people are looking for. We want to be different. We don’t want to be Crate & Barrel; we don’t want to be Pottery Barn. We’re, definitely higher priced. People come in all the time and think things are expensive, but to us, as designers, we’ll say, “God, that’s so cheap!” Coming from the design side, it’s a whole different ballgame. It’s a very different mindset from the retail market. They only have Restoration Hardware or Room and Board to compare us to. But we want to have something more special than that. That’s why we’ve forayed into more found pieces. We sell those pieces much more quickly. This is from Olean, which is from Ironies, the company I mentioned. But we sell more of our found items and accessories. One of the reasons Jeff and I started talking about this, is that as designers, we have a hard time finding our accessories. We would want accessories for a client; and we’d want to go and grab a whole bunch of stuff and go look at it in the room. We can’t really do that at the design center so much.

JM: So you mean stuff like the vase or the lamps.

Anni chandelier available at JAK Home. Photography by Oly Studio.

KN: Yes. That was a very valuable outcome, just being able to take little things off the shelves and go. We don’t want to go to the design center and order a lamp that takes 12 weeks. At that point in the project, people want things. We’re discovering that accessories sell, so we’re going to try to do more along those lines than furniture. We’ll have smaller pieces.

JM: Is that the one that was in Designer Showcase?

KN: Yes. We took the marble top off and obviously took the sink out of it and just put a wood top on it.

JM: It’s very handsome.

KN: Thanks. I’m supposed to be designing a line of furniture, but I’m lazy or too discombobulated.

JM: Sorry, I don’t think those are the right adjectives to describe you in any way, shape or form.

KN: Well, that is something that we’re working on.

Meri side table available at JAK Home. Photography by Oly Studio.

JM: Something for the future, a line of furniture.

KN: Yes.

JM: Well, I think that we’ll, probably, just end the interview on that note. It’s been a pleasure talking to you and very inspirational.

KN: Yeah. Come see us at showcase.

JM: Oh, we will.

Martha Angus. Photography by Christopher Flach

Light.  Art.  Elegance.  These three words are synonymous with celebrated local interior designer Martha Angus.  With international training in fine art and antique restoration, Martha has every reason to call herself an expert in the overlapping fields of interior design and fine arts.  While her career started on the east coast, we are very lucky to have her firmly rooted in the Bay Area.  This fall, Mueller Nicholls sat down with Martha at her gallery-like office space on Grant Avenue for an in-depth interview.  It will come as no surprise that we came away from the interview even more impressed by her breadth and depth of talents than when we started the interview.  Read on to find out why!

MN:      Here we are with Martha Angus. I’d like to thank you profusely for participating with us.

MA:      Oh, you’re more than welcome.

MN:      Would you start by talking about what your relationship to art and interior design was like growing up?

MA:      Growing up I always felt like an artist, and having moved over 35 times as a child –

MN:      Goodness.

MA:      Sometimes up to three times a year. So the whole idea of having a home that’s stable – a place that you can actually stay and develop – is the most important thing in the world to me. And it always was when I was growing up. When I was in high school, babysitting in some of the high end, gorgeous homes in our neighborhood, I just fell in love with the idea of being in one place, really developing it, and creating a home. So that’s always been super important to me.

MN:      Can I ask why you were moving so much?

MA:      My dad was with the government and they moved him a lot.

MN:      What an interesting policy!

MA:      Yes.

MN:      Hard on the family.

MA:      It’s very hard. I mean, there are good things about it. It makes you very outgoing and very open to new ideas because you’re constantly the new kid in school. So you have to be pretty sociable. It’s also made me very close to my sisters.

MN:      How many sisters do you have?

MA:      Two younger sisters.

MN:      And have they settled down now, too, not living a nomadic lifestyle anymore?

MA:      Absolutely. Same thing.

MN:      Putting down roots. Were you always painting, and did you always feel like and artist?

St. Helena residence by Martha Angus. Photography by Matthew Millman

MA:      Well, when I was little it was more like coloring in coloring books, but I always felt just madly in love with color and art. Actually, when I was in college, graduating from Carnegie Mellon in painting, I was passionate about it, but I also realized it was probably not a good idea. What was I going to do?  So I sort of accidentally fell into interior design. I was a receptionist for a showroom, and then I sort of worked my way up through the ranks to actually getting to staple fabrics on the showroom wings. Then a designer who knew me hired me. I just started as a junior designer and worked my way up. But I never studied interior design.

Sotheby’s Auction House in New York City

MN:      Was that at Sotheby’s?

MA:      No that was later. I started in interior design in Philadelphia and spent four years there. When I first went to New York I worked as a textile designer and then went to an architectural firm. That’s when I was studying at Sotheby’s.

MN:      How did you hook up with Sotheby’s?

MA:      I just heard about the courses and heard that they were amazing. I had always loved antiques and thought, “Instead of just loving them, I really want to study them.” And that’s what I did.

MN:      You talk a lot about Gustavian furniture in particular.

MA:      Which I love.

Alta Plaza residence (showing Gustavian chairs and ottomans) by Martha Angus. Photography by Matthew Millman

MN:      Is that where you learned about all the different types of furniture, when you were at Sotheby’s?

MA:      Much of it was self-taught when I was a child visiting my grandmother. I would spend summers with her, and next to my bed was a three-foot stack of antiques magazines. When I first saw the stack, I thought, “How boring is this?” Then I just started to read them and I realized that she was crazy about antiques. Then I realized that I really liked them too. Growing up, my mother collected antiques, as did my grandparents. And my parents always bought antique farmhouses and renovated them.

MN:      While you were moving 35 times?

MA:      Yes.

MN:      So you have a lot of experience with construction.

MA:      Yes. Absolutely. We were always renovating and fixing up places.

Seelinger family farmhouse photo

MN:      And were your parents doing some of the work themselves?

MA:      Oh, usually doing all the work themselves.

MN:      All the work?  All the electrical, plumbing, refinishing floors and –

MA:      And wallpaper. Only to leave it a few months and do it all over again someplace else.

MN:      Your parents must have had a lot of energy.

MA:      They absolutely did – always have and my mom still does.

MN:      That’s great!  So you studied art at Carnegie Mellon?

MA:      Yes, painting. When I first started Carnegie Mellon, I was a double major of graphic design and painting and sculpture. Not to diverge too much, but due to student shortages the graphic design students were mixed with the industrial design department.

MN:      Interesting.

MA:      So I was forced to do industrial design even though I never meant to. But I’m positive it was very good training for interior design. Even though I was doing bus shelters and appliances, it still was very much the same idea – plans, sections, details, materials, and illustrations. If anything, it was more technical than interior design. It was, as I said, a really good background.

Example of isometric drawing style, part of the repertoire of an Industrial designer

MN:      I always thought that people who were designing appliances are men.

MA:      Well, I was in there doing them.

MN:      I feel like when I’m using appliances, no one has paid attention to things like what it’s like to clean them or what it’s like to actually use them. Did you think about that?

MA:      Oh, absolutely.

MN:      That’s why I think women should be industrial designers, because they’re more likely to be concerned with how to clean things. I don’t know if you agree –

MA:      I totally agree. Oxo are beautifully designed.

MN:      They do a better job.

MA:      They certainly do.

MN:      So how did you decide to go to École des Beaux-Arts in France?

MA:      When I graduated from high school I was 17. My mother was a teacher and she said, “You’re too young to start college. That isn’t a good idea.” She said, “I think you should just go live in France, or live any place you want just for a year.” So I went over there. My grandmother had given me some money, actually a very decent amount of money, to go to school anyplace I wanted for a few years.

École des Beaux-Arts, Paris

I started in France and I actually loved it. I was there for about a year and a half. At the same time, my sister was in Australia so we would visit each other, meeting in Geneva. My parents were afraid I would marry a European.

MN:      Oh, really?  They weren’t happy with that idea?

MA:      No. They thought they were losing me forever. So they forced me to come back.

MN:      And you didn’t want to.

MA:      No. Absolutely not. No. So I went to school at Carnegie Mellon and actually started over again. But then a few months into Carnegie Mellon they said that they fully accepted all my credits in France, so then I skipped a year at Carnegie Mellon. I still had four years, just two freshman years and then a junior and senior year.

MN:      What did you love about France?

MA:      Everything. I felt like it was the most profound experience that had ever happened to me. Even though I had studied French for four years, I showed up in France and I felt as if I couldn’t say or understand anything!  To have all of my courses in French was staggeringly difficult. But I feel as if my old brain was taken out and I was given a brand new brain. It was the most profound change imaginable.

MN:      The École Des Beaux Art – is it in Paris?

MA:      Yes.

MN:      Such a fantastic city.

MA:      Yes. But I also went to a language institute in Vichy. And then I also went to the University of Grenoble. At that point I was really into skiing, so I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to live in the French Alps and ski every weekend?”

Les Gets in the French Alps

MN:      And did you do that?

MA:      I absolutely did. Yes!

MN:      And you were still studying?

MA:      Right. I was taking dissection courses. The French approach to fine art is completely differently than ours. In France, when you study anatomy, you do dissections. It was nauseating, but you really know musculature and the skeleton and Grey’s Anatomy by heart.

MN:      When you were doing your undergraduate in art, were you focused more on figurative drawing?

MA:      Yes. The idea of doing abstract work in France was just not even brought up.

MN:      Even now they don’t?

MA:      No, I’m sure now it’s changed. But back then it was all classical. We did tons of drawings and then worked our way up to grisaille – that’s when you’re painting on a tinted ground, sketching in forms, and then doing transparent glazes. They would say, “Every painting should have yellow, blue, and red.” It was an extremely old-fashioned way of making art.

Triptych of the Family Moreel, showing the traditional grisaille method, by Hans Memling. 1484

MN:      And very demanding and technical.

MA:      Yes.

MN:      Are you still painting at all?

MA:      I paint from time to time, but I really don’t have enough time.

MN:      You have a lot on your plate.

MA:      Exactly. From time to time I’ve taken evening courses at the Art Institute, which I love.

MN:      Great!

MA:      But again, it’s so difficult. Because this is, as you know, not a 9:00-5:00 job.

MN:      No, it’s way more than 9:00-5:00. And being a parent –

MA:      Exactly. Being a parent and going home and helping your kid with their homework and, for a teenage boy, making a dinner. Then making another dinner and then finding him some snacks. It’s kept me pretty busy.

MN:      It’s kind of like a second job, feeding a child.

MA:      Isn’t that the truth?

MN:      There was one article that I read where I saw a photo of a piece of yours.

Nob Hill apartment by Martha Angus. Above the chair is a piece by Lichtenstein. The color painting adjacent to the chair is a student copy, by Martha, of a painting by Fernand Leger. Photography by Cassandra Cole

MA:      I wonder what picture that was. Because usually the things I do I feel great about when I’m painting them, and then a few days later I’ll say, “It doesn’t look so good after all.”

MN:      Do you have a very strong inner critic?

MA:      Yes, I do.

MN:      I was wondering about that because you have so much knowledge about art, you travel to Art Basel every year, and you buy art for your clients. But then to also be an artist – if you have any inner critic at all, it would be almost a default position to be hard on yourself and just put everything away. Have you experienced that?

MA:      I do. But the one thing I will say is that I draw very well.

Hand drawn sketch of bedroom by Martha Angus

MN:      I bet you do.

MA:      That helps me with clients. So instead of saying, “I’m going to go back to the office and I’ll work something up on CAD,” I just draw the room or I draw the custom furniture right in front of them. So it’s a real time saver. And it’s just a really good way of illustrating things.

MN:      Right. And clients really like that, too.

MA:      They do.

MN:      Even in our digital world, I still think people like they physicalness of drawing.

MA:      Absolutely.

MN:      Does your family like your art?  Do you ever show your art to anyone?

MA:      It’s funny actually. Both of my sisters have tons of my art in their homes.

MN:      So they’re supportive?

MA:      Right.

MN:      They don’t have the same critical eye. Well, it would be neat to see some. I don’t know if you would ever show us, but I would love to see some – especially hearing about your background with doing the anatomy courses. Do you still remember those anatomy courses and what it was like to translate the interior of a body into a drawing?

Blue Chair, by Martha Angus

MA:      Well, in our classes it was called modèle vivant, which is figure drawing. It was absolutely more than just drawing the figure the way you saw it, but also knowing the internal structure and beefing that up so you could embellish a drawing with your knowledge. All those Beaux Art drawings that you see, that’s what they were doing. It’s just not recording what you see.

MN:      Right. Did that get translated into your work with Glamour?

MA:      Not really. Because when you’re doing fashion illustration, the last thing they want is some super muscular woman. Then it’s more like the 11 heads to the body instead of the 7.

MN:      I remember that.

MA:      I had studied with Steven Meisel at Parsons. Do you know who he is? –

MN:      The famous photographer!

Steven Meisel, fashion photographer

MA:      Yes, the famous photographer. But he was also a famous fashion illustrator for Women’s Wear Daily. He also did the book Sex with Madonna.

MN:      You studied with Steven Meisel?  Unbelievable!

MA:      Yes, I studied with Steven Meisel. He’s such a sweetheart. So I learned fashion illustration from him.

MN:      Amazing.

MA:      Of course everyone thinks he’s a great photographer, but trust me. He was smart enough to see, as a fashion illustrator working for Women’s Wear Daily, that all the big magazines started going towards photography. And he could read the writing on the wall. He thought, “Okay. I’m going to teach myself photography.” He did, and he’s become one of the greatest fashion photographers.

MN:      Right. He had that very profound depth of knowledge in the fashion world, starting out with Women’s Wear Daily.

MA:      Yes.

MN:      So how long did you work for Glamour magazine?

MA:      I worked for them maybe three or four years. It was quite a long time.

MN:      That is. What were you sketching for them?

MA:      I did “Fashion Workshop.”  So it’s the same way it is now, but now it has more photographs. You see someone wearing something atrocious and they put a bar over their eyes. So they may do descriptions of four different people wearing something terrible, and then four different people looking fabulous. In the past that was all drawn, and I used to draw it. I would also put a trip together with all the things to take, and then show a woman with all the separates and how to put them together.

Sketch for Menswear Magazine by Martha Angus

MN:      Do you have any of those magazines?

MA:      Actually, I’ve saved all my fashion illustrations.

MN:      And did you maintain your contacts from the fashion world?

MA:      I still have girlfriends who are in the fashion business in New York.

MN:      Has that been a source for clients?

Ralph Lauren flagship, which Martha worked on while at Naomi Leff & Associates

MA:      It was when I was in New York because I was a store designer. That was probably why I made the shift. I was a store and textile designer working on Seventh Avenue in the garment district. When I was doing stores in New York, we were asked to do the homes of the retailers, which is how I got into residential design. Ralph Lauren wanted us to do his stores and his homes. Interestingly enough, I didn’t even want to do homes. Then as we were doing them, I realized, “You know, this is actually kind of interesting.”

MN:      Did it connect with you on that level that you were talking about earlier, about wanting to have a sense of security and help someone else with their home and their stable place?  Were you thinking about it in that way at all?

Valentino gowns on display in NYC Saks Fifth Avenue storefront window

MA:      Probably. But I have to say that I was addicted to store design. I loved it because it was a form of theater. You’re selling merchandise, of course, but when you do Saks Fifth Avenue, a million people see your work. Then when you do someone’s home, maybe five people see your work. Or they have a party and 30 people see your work. I just loved the idea of fashion, theater, and a sense of place. Now I’m in San Francisco, and I’ve done a lot of work for some of the Fishers. So that’s sort of a tie into the fashion world. However, I met them out here, not in New York.

MN:      Do you have any background in theater as well?  Have you done any set design?

MA:      I did in high school. I did all the set designs for all the plays.

MN:      Did you go to a lot of different high schools?

MA:      No, I actually only went to one high school. My father switched from a government job to being a stockbroker, so we stayed in one place.

MN:      The whole family breathed a sigh of relief, probably.

MA:      Completely.

MN:      And was that back in Connecticut?

MA:      No, this was in Pennsylvania.

MN:      Dining by Design is also very theatrical.

Dining By Design table by Martha Angus. Light fixture by Bill Concannon of Aargon Neon. Photography by Peter Medilek

MA:      Very much so. Even a showcase house is theatrical. When you do something like that, you can’t do a real home, because quite frankly it will look boring. It has to be half home, half theater. It has to look amazing to someone just walking past it, and it also has to look good for the press. You have to think about how it would reproduce in a publication.

MN:      Did you do the work for Glamour first and then did you get into Sotheby’s?

MA:      Yes. When I first went to New York City after having left Philadelphia, I worked for an architectural firm. I made so little money that I had to take a second job. I had a full-time rep who went around showing my fashion illustrations to many different magazines. My fashion illustrations have been published probably hundreds of times in major magazines. I did that for the money. I would do the work at night.

MN:      So it was a side job.

MA:      Yes, I did it at night when I came home, sometimes not getting home until 8:00 PM. And of course, I was in my 20s so I could stay up ’til 3:00 AM in the morning drawing. I would deliver the work before I went to the office. Sometimes they would call me at work and they would want corrections or changes. Then I’d go over at lunchtime, make corrections and then after work sometimes have to go back to them again. So I was just burning myself out like crazy.

MN:      And you did that for four years?

MA:      Yes!  But I made lots of money and I had –

MN:      A lot of fun.

MA:      A lot of fun. Lots of wonderful clothes and trips and things like that.

MN:      Do you miss that world?

MA:      Not really. Because I found that once I was 30, I couldn’t pull off those all-nighters any longer.

MN:      I guess so. But the trips and the clothes, I bet that was a blast.

MA:      Absolutely. Living in New York I was so close to Europe. One of the nice perks or working in retail is that I got a huge discount. Not only did I get a huge discount – I also knew about the sales before anyone else. So I wore really incredible clothes when I worked at Saks. I was wearing Yves Saint Laurent all the time in my 20s, which I couldn’t even pull off now.

MN:      Well, that’s so very fun. Do you still have any of those clothes?

MA:      I still do.

MN:      That’s great. Do you still go back to France a lot?

MA:      I do. As a matter of fact, I’ve already been there twice this year. And a client just called yesterday who wants me to go in September. I’ve gone up to four times a year in the past, and this year will probably be about three times.

MN:      Do you maintain a lot of contacts there?

MA:      Yes I do.

MN:      And you still have friends from your days when you were studying?

MA:      No, but I definitely have a lot of friends who are furniture dealers and art dealers over there.

MN:      Do you buy more of your furniture and art in France?  Or is it kind of half-and-half?

MA:      No. Believe it or not, I actually think they’re not so great in art. I find art is best here in the States.

MN:      Interesting. So Art Basel is coming up?

MA:      Yes it is, in the beginning of December in Miami. Of course, they had the other one in Switzerland in June.

MN:      Do you ever go to the one in Switzerland?

MA:      No, I haven’t been to that one. I prefer the Miami one. It’s easier to get to and I love Miami. It’s an incredible affair.

MN:      Well, talk a little bit about it. What do you love about it?

Fluorescent sculpture by Spencer Fitch, who has shown at ArtBasel

MA:      Well, it’s essentially every major gallery in the world in one place.

MN:      It sounds huge!

MA:      Yes – there’s the convention center, which has all the major galleries. But smaller galleries actually take nearby hotels and take all the furniture out the rooms, so every single room in the hotel is a different gallery. Even individual artists who do print making or works on paper – things at lower price points, come to set up a room.

MN:      So artists also come and sell?

MA:      Yes. An artist sometimes will take a room themselves. So it’s a great way of just going from room to room to room, hotel to hotel to hotel, and just finding out about new artists, new work. It’s overwhelming, but it’s so worth it.

MN:      Fantastic!

MA:      I’ve gone with clients who actually know nothing about art, like some of my Wall Street clients in New York. These people may not know a lot about art, but they’re very fast learners. As I give them a tutorial and take them in and out of all these different galleries, they ramp up incredibly quickly. Sometimes we’ll buy art for an entire home in two days.

MN:      That’s thrilling.

MA:      It is thrilling.

MN:      Then you get to go back there and place it all.

MA:      Exactly.

MN:      When you’re with a client and you’re buying that much art, do you kind of know where each piece is going to go?

MA:      Oh, absolutely. You have to.

MN:      How do you keep all that information in your head?

MA:      Well, before you even go on the trip, you figure out how many walls need art and what size they are.

MN:      Okay. Do you try to coordinate colors in art?

Chicago Hotel Room by Martha Angus.

MA:      God, no. Art comes first. If there’s going to be any color coordinating, it goes with the art.

MN:      It’s afterwards.

MA:      Yes.

MN:      Like with the – I love that rug that you did.

MA:      Oh, the Lichtenstein rug?

MN:      Yeah, the Lichtenstein.

MA:      You’ll appreciate this. That was my son’s baby room carpet.

MN:      Really?

MA:      Yes, it’s Roy Lichtenstein from Vorwerk, which is a Belgian manufacturer. It was wall-to-wall. When I sold that house, I thought, “I’m not giving this carpet up.”  So I had it taken up and cut down to an area rug.

San Francisco flat by Martha Angus. Photography by Peter Medilek

MN:      That is great. And did you already have the Lichtenstein piece?

MA:      No, actually I bought from the Berggruen Gallery downstairs. I’ve always loved Lichtenstein.

MN:      Have you really?

MA:      I even had his dinner plates.

MN:      And I also read that you’re a big fan of Jeff Koons.

MA:      Yes.

MN:      What draws you to his work?

MA:      He reminds me a little bit of a modern day Warhol. Since I went to Carnegie Mellon, which is where Warhol went, I’m crazy about Warhol. But Jeff Koons has taken things that seem so common, like a blow-up floatie for little kids in a swimming pool, and he then casts them in aluminum and paints them. I was in France, actually as the market tanked in October, and I was seeing the Jeff Koons exhibition at Versailles. So I was looking at these floaties on a chain link fence in the middle of the Hall of Mirrors. It was phenomenal. I liked the high contrast. I’ve always loved that sort of everyday thing made into high art.

Balloon Dog Magenta by Jeff Koons

MN:      I wonder if he also echoes any of your study of industrial design.

MA:      You know what?  I never thought of that. You’re probably absolutely right.

MN:      I was looking at his website and he has some sculptures he does with vacuum cleaners. When he’s doing that art, he’s just taking a vacuum that’s already made, right?  Or is he designing it himself?

MA:      He may be casting it or recasting it. I have to say I’m not sure.

MN:      Well I just thought that was very interesting. Industrial design is so interesting in because of the impact design has on everything. That’s one of the reasons why I do like companies like OXO. Because they try to make things that are functional and beautiful.

MA:      Exactly. They feel good.

MN:      Is the creative process for you with interior design different than it is when you’re doing art?

MA:      No. As a matter of fact, I treat them the same way, which I like.

MN:      Tell me more about that.

MA:      Instead of the cerebral approach of what goes with what and what feels right, it’s more like making art. I actually go into a zone and I actually stop thinking. I just start feeling. It’s almost like playing on a Ouija board. You don’t think, you just let things flow and develop. That’s how I like to approach fine art and interior design. I absolutely approach it the way I do with painting.

MN:      And do you have clients that let you do that?

Russian Hill residence by Martha Angus. Photography by Peter Medilek

MA:      Of course, because I also absorb information about what they own, and all the fundamentals of a project. I take those and work it to what I think is the best solution. I find those solutions are better than just obsessing about it and debating it endlessly. Reworking things is not a good idea. In painting, there’s something called A la Prima, which means like the Impressionists, an artist just takes paint and starts painting. Let the paint fly. You get a better result from that rather than taking a single-hair brush and spending years on something. To me, that just kills a painting. And the same approach kills interior design.

MN:      Interesting. And do you look for that when you’re looking for artists, who have a less premeditated approach?

MA:      No, I just look for the end result. I’ll give you an example. Look at the Louise Fishman that I just bought. You can see that she didn’t belabor them. They’re just spontaneous and energetic. I love her work.

MN:      And how did you find out about Louise Fishman?

MA:      I first found out about her things because I saw them at Cheim & Read. Her paintings are extraordinary. And actually I do have a picture for you. I borrowed a gigantic painting of hers for Hamptons Showcase a few years ago. And when you see the photograph, you’ll admit it makes the room.

Hamptons Showcase home by Martha Angus. Art by Louise Fishburn. Photography by Phillip Ennis

MN:      Oh, I’d love to see it. I am a big fan of Helen Frankenthaler.

MA:      Oh, I love Helen Frankenthaler. Did you see the exhibition downstairs?  You must see it before it leaves because it’s phenomenal.

MN:      I think I missed the exhibition but I looked at their website and it looks like they always represent Helen Frankenthaler, which is so exciting.

MA:      They do.

MN:      Her approach was very unpremeditated. With the staining of the raw canvas…

MA:      Exactly.

MN:      Have you ever experimented with that kind of thing?

MA:      No, I’ve never done that sort of flowing paint. No.

MN:      What is your medium?

MA:      Well, I’ve worked in oils, acrylics, and wash. I’m open to mediums. Spray paint… All of the above.

MN:      I’d like to see the spray paint work!

MA:       (Laughs).

MN:      As builders without a background in art or interior design, we can sometimes be intimidated by this world of high style and high fashion. Do you ever have clients who come to you who say, “We don’t know how to negotiate all this art and design.” How do you help clients who might say that to you?

MA:      Well, some clients are already seasoned collectors, major collectors. But most of my clients are young people in their 30s, maybe early 40s, in Silicon Valley who very much want to get into it and want to learn.

MN:      So do you spend a lot of time educating them?

MA:      I do. Usually I have to educate clients without them knowing they’re being educated. Sometimes I’ll lend a client 50 auction catalogues so they can get a feeling for artists out there, as well as actual prices. Sometimes I’ll give stacks to a couple and they’ll each notate artists that they like. I’ll go to museums and galleries with them. I go to Europe with a lot of my clients. So I feel as if I’m teaching them and helping them and trying to find their inner voice and respect that. However, I do like emerging artists – it’s always good to get emerging artists. But I think it’s also important to get blue-chip art.

MN:      Who are some your favorite blue-chip artists?

MA:      Well, I’ve bought a lot of Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, quite a few Lichtensteins, quite a few Warhols, Ellsworth Kelly – the list would go on and on, but would include blue-chip artists primarily from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s. Well, Brice Marden’s making work now – I love his work.

White Bands on Yellow, ©Ellsworth Kelly 1959

MN:      What do you think people will say about art in the 21^st Century, 100 years from?  What trends to you see?  Do you ever step back and observe?

MA:      Oh, absolutely. But the thing is, if you think about 100 years ago, Bouguereau, the Victorian painter, was the hottest thing imaginable, at least in the late 1800s. Well he’s been despised for the last 90 years – despised. So his things went from the top of the market to the bottom of the market and stayed there. Recently there’s a little bit of a resurgence, like it’s almost kitsch to like him again. So it’s very hard to project who’s going to have staying power 100 years from now.

The Knitter by Bouguereau, 1886

Certain major league people like Picasso, Braque, de Kooning, Warhol who will hold their own. But think of the run-up of art prices in the 1980s – David Salle and Julian Schnabel come to mind – and they absolutely took a nose dive 10 years after that. Now they’ve been picking up again a little bit lately. So a lot of art is like the stock market. There may be rhymes and reasons to it, but it’s not so easy to understand.

MN:      Do you see trends in the art world, like going to Art Basel and seeing new and upcoming artists?  Are there themes?

MA:      Oh, absolutely. One year everything is geometric. And last year I saw a lot of infinity mirrors. There are absolutely trends.

MN:      Really?  Infinity mirrors?

MA:      Oh, yeah. Infinity mirrors.

MN:      What would that reflect?

MA:      I don’t know. All I know is you’d see one and then another and another and another.

MN:      Do the artists know that everyone else is doing infinity mirrors?  Or when they show up do they say, “What?  That was my idea!”

MA:      Well, you don’t know. Some of my friends are fine artists. Their assistants talk. It’s kind of like in fashion. Do you wonder why are there trends, and why is everyone on Seventh Avenue doing the same thing?  Even though the designers may not be talking, their assistants are talking. That’s the undercurrent. The same thing happens in fine art. Right now, for probably the last 10-15 years in contemporary art, things freshly made, things fresh out of Chelsea, were the hottest things. And then that market tanked like crazy. So right now blue-chip is staying strong, which is what I’ve always liked anyway. So lucky for me my collection hasn’t tanked with the market.

Expressionist Head by Roy Lichtenstein, 1980

MN:      But you’re always going to love Lichtenstein, whether or not other people love him.

MA:      Absolutely.

MN:      There’s just this certain connection that you have with that art. That’s interesting to try and understand. One of my questions was more of an interior design thing, although it relates to fashion. Do colors ever go out of style?

MA:      Oh, absolutely. Oh, my gosh.

MN:      And why do some colors come up and then they go down?  What governs that?

MA:      I think some of it is also just people looking for something fresh and new. And sometimes I think it’s emotional. I remember when I started in business, in the showroom, purple and neutrals were the hottest thing. Then I remember brown was big, lime green was big, bright yellow. But I’ve been watching all these colors come and go and come and go. Basically, it’s boring but beige has been throughout. Even white comes into fashion then goes out of fashion.

Alta Plaza residence by Martha Angus. Photography by Matthew Millman

MN:      Well, Michael Taylor was really big with white.

MA:      Yeah. And Michael Taylor, when you see homes that he’s done, they still look fresh and good, even from the ’70s.

MN:      That’s because he was very talented.

MA:      He was very talented. And very few people pull that off. Billy Baldwin could’ve done that. David Hicks could’ve done it.

MN:      Who are some of your other design icons?

MA:      Well, I like Mica Ertegun from MAC II. She did Bill Blass’ home. She’s in New York City –I’ve always loved her work. Sills and Huniford, when they were together – I also loved their work.

MN:      How did you hook up with Naomi Leff?

MA:      Through my partner in New York, Paula Caravelli. She was my assistant when When I first went to New York City after having left Philadelphia, I worked for Walker Grad, the architectural firm which later became Walker Group. They were the world’s largest store design firm. She was my assistant back then and we’ve stayed the best of friends ever since then.

MN:      What a great relationship.

MA:      Yes. When I left to go to Saks Fifth Avenue, she left to go to Naomi Leff. She was there for 12 years, which I think is the record there because it was a very difficult place to work. Paula actually hired me to work with her. I’ve always been very very good to assistants because time and time again they’ve gone on to big places and hired me. And that also happened to me at Estee Lauder. A woman had been my assistant, went to Estee Lauder, headed store design, and then hired me. That’s when I redid their offices, 1,000 offices in the General Motors building. I did Mrs. Lauder’s homes: She had over ten homes. I also did work for the rest of the family. So I did all of these incredible projects because I was nice to my assistant who made it big. Same thing with Paula.

Naomi Leff. Photograph by Scott Frances 2003

MN:      Was that a formative experience for you in terms of becoming an interior designer, working at Naomi Leff’s?

MA:      Well, it was because that’s when she was asked by Ralph (Lauren) to do his home. That’s when I was really doing seriously high-end residential work.

MN:      Did you stay in touch with Naomi?

MA:      I did, but she died young.

MN:      Yes, I read that.

MA:      She was extremely intense and she just kind of burned out.

MN:      Did she really?

MA:      She did. She would work from 9:00 in the morning until 3:00 the next morning – staggeringly intense.

MN:      Wow. Of course, you were doing that, too. You just had two separate jobs.

MA:      Well, that’s right. But Naomi actually paid me very well, extremely well.

MN:      So once you were working with Naomi Leff, you were not illustrating for Glamour anymore?

MA:      No. I didn’t need to. Almost all of Naomi’s clients were billionaires so we just did truly high-end work. It made me realize that I had no idea how middle of the road all the work up until then was. But her clients had a couple of Gulf Stream V’s, Gulf Stream VI, which we did as well. So it was just so high-end. It was fabulous.

MN:      What was it like to manage those clients?

MA:      They’re very demanding. But as long as you give them what they want, they would be happy. We also did work for Hilary and Galen Westin, who are I think are just about the wealthiest people in Canada. We did their homes. We did their stores. We did their offices. Again, as long as you gave…  I always thought to myself, “I’d love to be one of Naomi’s clients.” She gave everything to those clients.

MN:      What does that look like?  So it means that they’re returning phone calls at 2:00 a.m. in the morning?

“We are here, 24-7, call anytime.”

MA:      Absolutely.

MN:      Or they call and say, “I’m out of towels,” or something like that?

MA:      Yes. And if it means you have to have 20 people draw all night to give them ideas by morning, that’s exactly what you do. I worked hard every place in New York. But I really worked unspeakably hard there. It was very good training. Because I took those work habits and brought them to a place like San Francisco, and it’s been very good for me. I have a New York work ethic.

MN:      Perhaps not everyone in San Francisco has the same work ethic?

MA:      That’s right. But it can also be generational. I’m not sure if it’s a geographic thing or a generational thing. Or maybe it’s a little bit of both.

MN:      Well, that’s interesting: Just think about a person in her 20s, living in New York and having a job that doesn’t pay enough. So a person has to have a second job, which is also pretty demanding.   You can’t eat lunch and can’t eat dinner, and you probably just have a sandwich or something on the go.

MA:                  Well –

MN:      You did that for four years. That must have been very grueling.

MA:      It was. It was very intense.

MN:      What is it like to then scale down a little bit and work with people who are not billionaires?  Is it different or do you just kind of have the same output?

MA:      Well, it’s different because the people we were working for in New York – like Bunny Mellon, Ralph Lauren, Armani – all of these people were older and wealthier. Here I find my clients in Silicon Valley are young. I’ve gone from the average age of 60 for a client to 30, and it is different. But I love it!  I love helping them get their homes together. And they’re just getting married or just starting to have children. I love working with families.

Kentfield residence by Martha Angus. Photography by Matthew Millman

MN:      Do you ever feel like a part of you must know how to do marriage counseling?

MA:      All the time. All the time.

MN:      We joke about that a lot.

MA:      I’m sure you do in construction, too.

MN:      Yes. People don’t realize when they’re starting out, if they haven’t done construction, how intrusive and difficult it is and how emotional it is to have your house torn apart.

MA:      Completely.

MN:      When we get it torn apart, people don’t necessarily know that we can put it back together. It’s very hard emotionally to have your house torn apart!

MA:      It’s true. When someone’s doing a renovation, and when I recommend a contractor, I think about how good the work is. But also I ask myself how well can they get along with the client and their family and their children. It has to be both.

MN:      Right. You have also remodeled. You built a home in Napa?

St. Helena residence by Martha Angus. Photography by Matthew Millman

St. Helena residence by Martha Angus. Photography by Matthew Millman

MA:      Yes.

MN:      And you have an apartment here in San Francisco, a flat?

MA:      Yes. I renovated that but now I’ve just moved to a high-rise where I don’t have to renovate anything.

MN:      So you have been your own client.

MA:      Yes. Boy is that hard!

MN:      What can you tell us about that?

MA:      What’s hard about it is I’m used to doing all these wonderful things for our clients which I cannot afford. So then I have to think about, “Well, what’s good enough and will still give me a great result?”

Martha acquired this statue of Pluto in France, and it reminds her of a “Poor man’s Koons,” (referring to Jeff Koons).

MN:      Yes. People might not realize about this business, is that you do all these things for your clients but it’s not economically feasible for a lot of us.

MA:      You must experience the same thing.

MN:      Yes, because there’s not really that much money in construction. It’s hard for there to be any money at all in design!

MA:      Right.

MN:      People don’t realize how much effort you put into design.

MA:      Oh, completely. Absolutely.

MN:      They don’t understand.

MA:      It just looks easy.

MN:      Well, it looks easy because you’re so good at it.

MA:      Well, no. I think people just don’t know – even I’m surprised at how much goes into it and I should know better.

MN:      It’s always surprising!  In some ways that good because it means we’re not totally burned out and cynical. But people don’t understand the depth of your knowledge, and they don’t understand how difficult construction is. So there’s this constant process of education that goes on.

MA:      But the thing is, for me to be able to do a good job I need a good architect and I need a good builder. If I don’t have good bones, it doesn’t matter what I put into the room. It’s just never going to look good. So I’ve got to have a good shell, good materials, good bones, and then my work can look spectacular. If I don’t have those, I don’t have anything.

MN:      Are there things that you wish contractors wouldn’t do when they’re building?

MA:      Well, I’ve worked with some contractors who have dreadful taste and they’re actually trying to drive the design because they think they know better. I’ll give you an example. I remember I worked with a contractor once who said, “Well, what’s wrong with brown vinyl base?” Well that’s just –

Just shoot me…

MN:      That question can’t even be answered.

MA:      Exactly. When I hear something like that I think, “Oh, so this is what this person’s instincts are for the whole house?  I’m going to have to monitor him all the time.”  I really don’t want to have to do that. What I want is a contractor who will actually come to me with better ideas than even I have. Like, “Martha, have you thought about doing it this way?” And it’s some fabulous detail and I say, “Oh, this is so fabulous. What else do you have in mind?”

MN:      Probably some contractors have design sense. But most of us just need to follow your lead.

MA:      If you’ve done many beautiful homes in the past, then you have the experience to make some fabulous suggestions.

MN:      Right.

MA:      Or even if you don’t have suggestions, just build it beautifully, build it on time, and build it on budget. That’s all I want. Not too much to ask for!

MN:      No, I don’t think so. Now how did you meet Phillip? (Phillip Parton  is an architectural designer that works often on Martha’s projects.)

MA:      I met Phillip through a friend. As Phillip’s always reminding me, I I’ve known him for over ten years.

MN:      He’s been here the whole time?

MA:      Yes. Well, he actually has a separate practice.

MN:      That’s right. So he has a separate practice, but he does a lot of work with you?

MA:      He does. He does a lot of custom cabinetry. He’s fabulous at furniture plans and custom furniture. We use him a lot.

MN:      Sometimes it seems like there can be tension between architects and interior designers.

MA:      Yes.

MN:      Why is that?

MA:      I think sometimes you have some ego battles going on. But because I started out in an architectural firm in New York, doing color, materials, and furniture for architects, I feel as if I have a really sympathetic and cohesive relationship with architects. I fully realize that we’ve got to be able to do it as a team. It doesn’t work to have one person thinking they’re going to bully the rest of the team around. The contractor, the interior designer, the architect, the landscape architect – they absolutely have to play nice. They have to.

San Francisco Decorator Showcase House by Martha Angus. Photography by Matthew Millman

MN:      Have you found that it’s become more difficult to play nice as the economy has tanked?

MA:      No. Maybe that’s coming more from the client and budgets, but not from the team members.

MN:      Stress affects us all and everybody is worried about their business. Even the most successful firms are downsizing and it’s more difficult to find work. Are you experiencing any of that?

MA:      Right. Well, for us, that was last year’s story. The year before, even into the beginning of last year, I still had a lot of installations. So I had a fabulous spring. Then around May or so it was like dropping off a cliff. Then it picked again this past January. I finally feel as if I’m ramping back up. And I fully expect to be doing a good business.

MN:      Congratulations, that’s fantastic.

MA:      Yes. I’ve got to stay positive.

MN:      It is good to be positive. Did you choose this location specifically to be near the Berggruen Gallery?

MA:      Yes. I used to come here looking through this space, which actually was just one of their galleries. And when we rented the space, I said, “Just leave the art up. I’ll put my furniture in the middle.” People still come in here and think it’s a gallery. We just let them walk through. When they look at the art, they probably think we’re some kind of conceptual installation art in the middle. They might think we’re a bunch of artists retaining their designers. “That’s a wonderful piece, what does that cost?”

MN:      Too funny.

MA:      But I love just being in an artistic environment.

MN:      And do you do a lot of work with them?

MA:      Well, we march our clients downstairs to check and out the exhibitions. Plus we all go to the openings. We just walk down one floor and get a glass of wine and see the new show.

MN:      Very nice.

MA:      It’s fabulous.

MN:      And what’s the show right there now?

MA:      Well, they’ve had a young artist – I can’t remember his name. He has his work done in India. It’s really fantastic. That, I think, is coming down. I think a new show is going up. And then there’s a group show on the second floor with quite a few different artists. They do have a big Helen Frankenthaler and a Joan Shapiro sculpture, and I think a David Parks painting as a group show.

Painting by Helen Frankenthaler, whose work is on permanent display at the Berggruen Gallery.

MN:      Do you ever get over to the East Bay to see the art over there?

MA:      Do you really want to know?

MN:      I do want to know. Actually, I’m very curious about it.

MA:      I’ve been thinking that it’s kind of like New York and Brooklyn.

MN:      Brooklyn! That’s exactly what it’s like.

MA:      Do you think it’s the same?  Because in New York people will say, “You live in Brooklyn? Oh, I feel sorry for you.” Now all of a sudden the hippest people live in Brooklyn. The newest art scene is in Brooklyn. So I think the same could happen here, because this is such an expensive city. Where are people going to go?  They’ve already started Emeryville, right?  And it’ll just continue.

MN:      I’m pretty excited to be in Oakland.

Statue of wolf in front of Jack London’s cabin, Oakland. Photography by Shiloe Bear

MA:      Well, I spend a lot of time over there. And it’s great how nice it is as well.

MN:      Yes, there are a lot of nice neighborhoods to walk through. Still, there’s a lot of construction and a lot to be done. We’ll see.

MA:      I told you more than you ever wanted to hear.

MN:      No, this is all wonderful. I’m very appreciative of you speaking with us.

MA:      Oh, no. Thank you.

MN:      And just to close, why don’t you just say three things you’re looking forward to in the close of the year?

MA:      The end of the year?

MN:      Yes. Because we’re at the last quarter, right?

MA:      Yes. Well, I think profitability and working on fabulous projects with fabulous clients, which isn’t always about the budget. It’s about creating a wonderful result, which is very important to me.

MN:      And you’re going to France in September.

MA:      Yes. But I’m also watching my son go to college.

MN:      Where’s he going?

MA:      Boston University.

Boston University

MN:      Back east. Far away!

MA:      Exactly. It will give me a reason to keep going out there, to visit him. So that’s my big project to get launched.

MN:      Yes, that’s huge. You have the one child?

MA:      Just one, yes.

MN:      Now the nest is empty.

MA:      Exactly. And it happens faster than you think, Jill. You’ll see.

MN:      Well, on that note I think we’ll close. Thank you so much.

MA:      You’re welcome, Jill.

Metropolitan Home Showcase home 2009 by Martha Angus. Photography by Peter Medilek

Interviewer: Jill Moran

Jill Moran is a construction professional with 20 years of varied experience in high-end residential remodeling. Her recent entry into motherhood, timed precisely with the downturn in the local construction industry, has resulted in a slight re-engineering of her career. She currently works closely with the management team at Mueller Nicholls, with an emphasis on communicating to the world at large about residential remodeling.

Vernon Applegate

Please join us for an interview with Vernon Applegate, the yin of the yin-yang creative genius behind the dynamic design firm Applegate Tran Interiors.  Vernon’s international upbringing, studies abroad, and his degree in architecture all influence a design vision that pushes conventional boundaries, often using materials in startling ways.  The unique results are a breath of fresh air in today’s world of mass-produced cookie cutter designs.  Read on and be inspired.

MN: First we’d just like to thank you very much for participating with us.  Let’s just start by talking about your early influences in your life that lead you toward design.

VA: I don’t know where to begin with that, because I think there’s so many influences that I had as a kid.  My parents appreciated the arts.  My father was an engineer for the phone company, and my mother was a nurse – both very educated people and they always appreciated the arts.  So whenever we had the chance as a kid they would take us to museums in Philadelphia or the museums in New York or Washington D.C. That always had an influence on me.  And the people that I grew up with and around, also my aunts and uncles had a big influence on me in that respect.

MN: Do you remember going to museums?

VA: Oh, I do.

MN: Did you have a favorite museum?

VA: I just remember just being small and remembering how big the Met was.

Metropolitan Museum of Art—Great Hall

MN: How great, for a kid.

VA: And how incredible.  Then also as a small kid I was very fortunate because I got to travel quite a bit.  I traveled to Europe many times as a kid.

MN: Your parents took you?

VA: My parents took me, and then I also had some aunts that also traveled a lot, so I would travel with them.  So it was a good experience growing up.  I mean, we grew up in a very rural area in New Jersey, but my parents always loved the arts.  So I think that had a big influence on me in my early years.  And then I always liked to draw as a kid, I took different art classes, and then finally going to an art school really opened up my eyes quite a bit.

MN: You studied at the University of Arts in Philadelphia?

VA: I did.

MN: And what was that like there?

VA: It was a whole new chapter in my life.

MN: Was it a departure from what you had been doing before?

VA: Well, going from high school to college is always a departure.  I got to see new things, get challenged by teachers and professors and colleagues, as well as other students.  And it was really sort of the stepping stone for what I’m doing today.  If I hadn’t gone to school I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today.

MN: Were there things that you learned or principles that you learned studying at the university that you still use today?

VA: I think – again, I think it was sort of the stepping stone, but I think it was more about opening my eyes to the creative process.  It was  having people – professors and other artists – sort of push me in different directions, and enlighten me to other possibilities in the world that I hadn’t really seen before.  That was a huge stepping stone in having my own business and being a principal of a design firm.

MN: Were you studying art as an undergraduate?

Karol Table by Applegate Tran Furniture. All furniture photography by David Duncan Livingston

VA: I studied architecture, but it was at a fine arts school, so I also had to take drawing classes and painting classes.  I minored in photography.  One of the things it also taught me is that there are no limitations, and to always push yourself.  And I know you ask about how we push or come up with some of these designs – I’m always also using that in terms of pushing my clients and pushing the designs, because I like to have a variety of different types of projects.  We have traditional clients.  We are more known for our contemporary work, but we do have traditional clients. I enjoy those just as much as I enjoy my more contemporary and sort of modern projects, just because it takes me out of that element and I get to see something from a different view point.  And I have to sort of focus in on that, and then I can turn around and use some of those aspects in some more of my contemporary designs, bringing some classical elements into contemporary designs, proportions and color palates.  So that’s life- a combination of growing and learning and bringing my experience to our projects.

MN: Did you have a senior project?

VA: I did.  We had to take a painting, an artist.  I chose a Russian constructivist, just because I love Russian constructivism.  And we had to interpret that into almost a living type of monument that you can enter.  I took a Russian constructivist’s painting, El Lissitzky, and – I forget the name of the painting now that I used for it –

"Proun 19D" by El Lissitzky, c. 1922

MN: It will come back to you.

VA: I remember designing something for the Philadelphia waterfront.  Obviously it was all in theory, but it was a lot of fun.  And back then CAD drawings weren’t really used yet, so we had to do everything by hand.

MN: What do you love about Russian constructivists?

VA: Well, just their play on forms.  The tension between the forms.  To me there’s sort of an abstract environment in most of them.  So that’s what I like about it, especially studying architecture and really being in love with architecture and interiors.  That’s what I love about it.

MN: Can you talk about some of your mentors and what it was like to have mentors and then develop your own design vision?

Alexander Rodchenko ''Dance'', 1915 Russia

VA: I think again through time there were always different mentors for different periods in my life.  Obviously when I was young, my mentors were my parents and teachers, and then professors and architects and other artists.  Today, I mean, I would definitely say my partner is one of my biggest mentors.  We really bounce ideas off each other and he really pushes me a lot of times.

MN: Gioi?

VA: Gioi does.  So he’s one of my biggest mentors right now.  I don’t know if I have a prolific name that I can say is a mentor of mine.

MN: It doesn’t have to be.

VA: There are some colleagues—Gary Hutton is definitely somebody that I really admire and love his work.  Ron Woodson and Jaime Rummerfield from L.A.— I really love their work, and just their work ethic and their style.  So I think those are some other designers that are mentors to me.

Ron Woodson and Jaime Rummerfield, LA based interior designers

MN: Do you remember your first paid designing engagement?

VA: My first paid on my own?

MN: First paid on your own.

VA: I don’t want to use names, but yes, I had just quit working for another designer and didn’t know what to do, and I got a phone call and someone wanted me to design their kitchen, so that’s actually how I started.  And then a few months later I met Gioi, and we formed our company together.

Family Room by Applegate Tran Interiors, currently under construction in Hillsborough

MN: So when did you guys form your company again?

VA: In June of ’99, and my first project was in ’98.

MN: And how did you meet Gioi?

VA: We met online actually.

MN: You did?

VA: Yeah, we did.

MN: Are you life partners as well?

VA: We are.  So yeah, we met and hit it off and he had his own projects and I had my own projects, and we thought, “This is kind of strange having our own projects, why don’t we just combine and see how that works.”  And it did.

MN: What has it been like to work with a partner instead of having your own business?

VA: Like I said, he’s one of my biggest mentors, and I don’t think I’d be able to do it without him.  We really bounce ideas off each other, and also we play off of each other’s strengths and weaknesses.  There are certain things that he does extremely well that I don’t, and vice versa.  And within our company we usually divide up the projects, so he takes certain clients and I take certain other clients.  We always have the lead designer, so he’d be the lead designer for certain projects and I’ll be a lead designer for others.  And sometimes we’ll work on a project where he’s lead designer for part of it and I’m the lead designer for another part of it, like the Orinda kitchen.

Orinda kitchen by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by David Duncan Livingston

MN: Yes, was he a lead designer on that one?

VA: He was lead designer on the kitchen part of it, and then the rest of the house I did.

Orinda bath by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by David Duncan Livingston

MN: Well that’s great.  I was wondering about respective strengths and weaknesses.  Mueller Nicholls also has three partners, I don’t know if you knew that.

VA: No, actually I didn’t.

MN: You interact mostly with Eric Goetting, because he runs the shop.  But then we also have Steve Nicholls, who is the main ownership person, and Chris Vaughan who runs production.  So they definitely have strengths and weakness that play off each other, and it’s nice to have that partnership.

VA: It is.  It helps.  I mean, I couldn’t do it all.  Gioi obviously does most of the marketing, the networking.  I’m usually the quieter of the two.  So he – I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but he likes to do more of the space planning and that type of design and I love fabrics and color and materials and furnishings.  You know we have our own furniture line.

MN: Yes.

VA: And that’s because of my love for furniture, that’s where our furniture line sort of came from.

MN: Do you handle most of the design for the furniture line then?

VA: I do.  That’s about 99 percent me.

Nazari Bed by Applegate Tran Furniture

MN: That’s great!

VA: I always like to reinvent and re-energize ourselves, and that’s something that has brought new life into our company.  I always have to open a new page.

MN: Do you have other creative outlets?  Like, are you still doing photography?

VA: I’m not doing photography anymore, although I love it.  But technology today has changed so, and I’m not doing photography anymore.  At home we have almost an acre of land.

MN: Oh, really?

VA: We don’t live in the city – we live outside the city.

MN: Where do you live?

VA: We live in the East Bay.  We have a garden that I’m sort of transforming, so that’s sort of my other passion, gardening.  I’ve had people ask me will I do their gardens, and I say no, just because it’s really a love of mine, and I don’t want to do it for anyone else.  I just want to do it for myself.

Vernon and Gioi’s garden in the East Bay hills

MN: That’s so nice to have an acre of land, but still in the city.

VA: Yeah, we have a house, and then we bought the property next door, which was a vacant lot, so between the two, it became almost an acre.  We’re really thrilled about it.

MN: Oh, it’s very exciting!  And how did you decide to design the furniture?  Was that just a brainstorm, or did some clients already ask you to do furniture for them?

VA: Well, I always wanted to do custom furniture, but I didn’t think in terms of the magnitude of having my own production line.  Where it started was I would be looking for something for a client, and if the client had the means, I would design something custom for them.  Through the years I kept on designing custom pieces for clients, and then realized, “Well, I almost have a collection here with pieces I’ve designed for our clients.”  So most of the pieces are actually named after our clients, and hence we have the Vivienne Mirror, the Cara Mirror and the Karol Table; sometimes I use the first name, sometimes I use the last.  And then through our connection to Vietnam – Gioi is Vietnamese –we met a group of people and started producing our furniture there.  We have all the upholstery and certain other pieces made here.  I’m the kind of person that’s always looking for new resources no matter what I’m doing.

Karol Table by Applegate Tran Furniture

MN: You have that eye.

VA: I do, and I enjoy it.  And that’s definitely something that’s different between Gioi and me.  When he’s on vacation, he has other passions that he loves to do, and I’m always like, “Well, let’s go to this factory.”  He’s like, “Factory?  I don’t want to go there.”  So yeah, that’s sort of one of my passions, trying to find new great resources.

MN: Have you found a recent new great resource that you’re very excited about?

VA: I have.  We’re probably going to be coming out with – it’s in the very extremely preliminary stages – some lighting.  I have found a resource that I really like and we’ve done a couple of custom pieces for clients and really love the quality and working with this person.

MN: Well, that leads me to one of my other observations.  There’s that grouping of the six or twelve pendants in one of your projects called “The G House.”

VA: Yeah, I’m trying –

MN: It’s a clear conical glass pendant, and there’s a frosted section at the bottom –

VA: Oh, I know which one now.

MN: So they’re a very familiar pendant, and I’ve seen them a lot.

San Francisco loft by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by Chris Stark. Lighting by FLOS.

VA: I’m trying to remember who the manufacturer is, I might be wrong, I think it’s Artemide.

MN: It might be Artemide – I think it is Artemide.

VA: And you can buy them individually, or you can buy them as a grouping.  So we bought them – I forget how many there were, I think there were eight.

MN: I think there might be 12 on the table.

VA: 12, okay.  It was a home in the East Bay where we really opened up the space, but when you first walk into the house, you walk in on this catwalk, and then you walk down some stairs which go down into the living room/dining room area.  It’s two stories over their dining table, so we wanted something that had mass, but yet also didn’t block the view and even though it had mass, it had a lightness to it.  So those lights, I do just love them, and I think they worked really well in that space.

MN: Well, I’ve seen them used a lot, but I think that grouping with that many is just fantastic.  I just love that, and the way you described that space, it’s a perfect solution.

VA: Thank you.

MN: So that’s one of the things we love about remodeling, is just having these problems and being able to find solutions for them.  It’s fantastic, really fun.

VA: Yes, they are.

MN: We have enjoyed working with you a lot, and doing very unusual designs, and I was lucky because I got to see that makeup table that’s being built right now, which I love.

VA: That got installed about a week and a half ago; the client was really thrilled.  All the cabinetry that’s in the room turned out phenomenal, and I’m again very lucky I had a client that was open to having me push her limits, and sometimes she would push mine, and she also had the means.

MN: That’s a good combo.

VA: It is a great combo.  And also this was their third house that we’ve done for them, so each project became easier in terms of being able to push the limits, and this was going to be their final house for awhile, for a long time.  So it was a lot of fun.  The whole project’s been a lot of fun.

MN: It seems like you are able to kind of push the envelope, but how do you get your clients to do that?  Does it have to be a client who already wants that?

Living room by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by David Duncan Livingston

VA: I think anyone that sees our work and is going to hire us because that’s what they want.  They want something that’s different, that’s not like your next door neighbor’s home.  It’s also something that we talk about in the very beginning, telling them “We’re going to push your boundaries – that’s why you hired us.” They probably shouldn’t hire us if they don’t want their boundaries pushed, although at the very end, it’s always the client’s decision about what gets done and how things look.  We’re going to show them the top and what we think is the most exciting thing for the room, and then we go from there.  I know one of your other questions was about budget.

MN: Right.  Well, that’s kind of the flip side, because you have to have the clients who are willing to take risks, but some of the more risky designs are more difficult to execute and therefore can be more expensive.

VA: They usually are.  I always let our clients know that it’s a luxury to hire an interior designer, that 90 percent of the people in the world cannot hire interior designers.  It is a luxury.  It’s not a cheap process.  But again, we give them something that is hopefully really thrilling to them, so every time they come home they are in love with their home and they really enjoy being there.  We talk about the budget right up front, and sometimes clients are very open with us to let us know what a budget is going to be; other clients are not as open, but we keep on pushing that envelope too.  Sometimes we have clients that want us to do a design first, and then they’ll talk about budget.  So when I have a client that’s like that, then I do a couple of different things.  I try to show them some things first depending on the type of project.  We have two types of projects – our decorating projects, and our architectural projects.  So when it’s a decorating project I’ll just show them some furniture and sort of try to see what they like and what their expectations are in terms of price point, and then I can sort of build on that and realize, “Okay, if they’re willing to spend $3,000, $5,000, $20,000, $30,000, $70,000 for a sofa, then I can generalize.  I get an idea.

Moon Bench by Applegate Tran Furniture

MN: An idea of what the overall budget might be.

VA: What the budget might be.  So it really depends.

MN: Have you found that it’s more difficult in this economy to talk about budget, or are people more interested in finding out up front?

VA: No, we still talk about it.  It’s something that just part of the process – we are just real up front with it.  “What is your budget, what do you have to spend?”  If they give us a number that we feel is unrealistic, then we’ll tell them; we’ll say, “You know, this is an unrealistic budget for what you’re wanting to spend and what your expectations are.”  So it’s based on expectations and the budget.

MN: So do you have a sense of construction costs versus interior decorating costs, and do you try to talk about both, or if it’s an architectural job do you try to get contractors involved to discuss the budget?

VA: Again, it depends on what the scope of the project is.  If it’s just a kitchen, say a remodel or an addition, we’ve done enough so we have a general idea of cost, so we give them a very generic range.  We can come up with some concepts and then we can start pulling together all the other people that need to be involved in the process.  Or if we’re working with an architect (sometimes we’re brought on secondary), the architect has already specified budgets, and then the client has a good idea of what the project is going to cost.  So we work many different ways.

MN: Well, it seems as though there can be a tension between architects and interior designers, and I was wondering if you can comment on that, if you feel that’s somehow inherent.

Dining room by Applegate Tran Interiors. Currently under construction in Hillsborough

VA: I think it’s really about communication and egos.  Gioi and I don’t have huge massive egos, so we’re pretty open to working with architects.  I’d say with 90 percent or more of the architects that we’ve worked with we’ve enjoyed the process, they’ve enjoyed the process; it’s been a real collaboration, and that’s where we see it.  And again it depends, for us, what the process is.  Because sometimes we’re brought on secondary, we know that the architect then already has the vision.  We take the cues from the architect and try to build and enhance that in working with them.  If we’re brought on first and then the client asks us to bring an architect on, it’s a little bit of…

Powder room by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by David Duncan Livingston.

MN: Dynamic?

VA: Yeah, a different dynamic.  So it really depends.

MN: Do you have architects that you have really good collaborative work with?  Are there architects that you can weigh in on some architectural themes as well as more interior design themes?

VA: Oh, most definitely.  We did a project down in Palo Alto with the architect John Barton, and it was a real joy working with him.  He definitely had his vision on the project; he was on the project first.  It was about an 8,000 square foot home – new construction – but we also got to have our input in talking about the layout, making sure how things flowed inside the house would work in terms of space planning and relationship to furniture and how you live in the home.  It was a great relationship working with him.

MN: If you’re talking about how furniture is laid out, are you already choosing furniture pieces in the planning stage, or are you just saying, “This is going to be a sofa and coffee table over here.”

VA: In the very beginning it’s just exactly that.  It’s just sort of a generalization, and then as the process continues and gets more refined, then we start figuring out what those pieces are going to be and making sure that that works with the client’s lifestyle.  On that project the client was very involved.  We had many, many meetings with John, myself, and the home owner, and we would be sitting there for many, many hours.

MN: Marathon meetings.

San Francisco living room by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by David Duncan Livingston.

VA: Yes, marathon meetings of how furniture was going to be laid out and how big the corridor in the front of the house was going to be; all kinds of things.  Because the home owner had certain criteria that he wanted to see in the house and that criteria, during the process, changed.  And that’s just one project.  There have been other projects where we’ve brought architects on board because either A, the project started out as we’re going to do this one little thing, and then all of a sudden –

MN: All we want is a new sink, now we need a second story addition; we’re going to move the master suite upstairs.

VA: So we’ve done that.

MN: That’s what we call scope creep.

VA: So yeah, we’ve done that.  We had a project in San Mateo that was like that.  We were just going in to do the kitchen and all of a sudden it became kitchen, family room, new master suite, second floor, bathroom, laundry room, power room, wine cellar.

MN: A perfect example of scope creep.

San Francisco entry by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by David Duncan Livingston.

VA: Then we brought an architect on board to help us with all the architectural details.  So we really did it up, but then he sort of drew up and designed all the architectural details for us.

MN: Interesting.  So it seems like you can have a very nice collaborative process with architects and –

VA: We do.

MN: I think that Eric has felt the same way, that you are very collaborative when we’re working with you.

VA: I feel the same way with anyone that we’re working with, whether it be a contractor, a furniture maker, cabinet maker, tile person; whatever.  We’re always very open to the dialog, because something might look great on paper, but when you go to actually construct it, it is a whole different ballpark.  The people that are building it are usually the ones that would tell us, “Hey Vernon, you need blocking in the back of this cabinet otherwise it’s going to wobble.”  Sometimes I’ll design something and then the fabricator will come back to us and say, “Well, if you just change this one little detail, it’s going to be a 20 percent reduction in cost,” So we listen.

San Francisco kitchen and family room by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by Dean Birinyi.

MN: Is there a new product or material that you’re just starting to use that you think has a lot of possibilities that you’re very excited about?

VA: Well, I do like acrylics.  I think they’re very hot right now.  They’re not very green.

MN: Probably not.

VA: And that’s something else that I’m sort of wanting to explore more, but I also find the word “green” is thrown out there too much.

MN: It’s used quite a bit these days.

VA: I just went to a new restaurant – I won’t mention the name – but the owner of the restaurant said, “Oh, and our tables are all green.”  Because they’re recycled wood, but then they’re coated with a really thick – some type of epoxy.

MN: Undoubtedly some hideous chemical.

VA: In my mind, that’s not green.  The tables are gorgeous, they were phenomenal, but they weren’t green.

MN: It seems like there are a lot of people that are very concerned about our planet, and a lot of the drive towards sustainability is driven by that, but there’s a whole other aspect to it which we sometimes call green-washing, where anything can be called green.

VA: Yes.

MN: Vinyl windows can be called green, and there’s nothing green about vinyl in my opinion.

"Environmentally friendly?"

VA: I was just talking to a colleague the other day that sometimes the materials that are in the item are green, but the process to produce them is not.

MN: Once you start looking into it, it’s kind of like there’s not a black and white – a lot of it is very grey.  Bamboo is a good example; it’s considered to be green.

VA: But it takes a lot of water.

Photography by Ray Bodden

MN: And a big mono-culture like that, taking over a natural forest – you really have to question that.

VA: Actually, that was the example that we were talking about just the other day, because we were talking about flooring, and people are saying, “Well, bamboo flooring is green,” and we’re like, “Yes, in one extent it is because it reproduces so quickly, but then it’s not because it takes so much water to grow.”

MN: I didn’t know about the water aspect of it.  Monocultures compared to sustainably harvested forests have a very different impact on the environment and on ecology in general.

VA: It is something that I’m excited to learn more about.

Goldstein Side Table by Applegate Tran Furniture

MN: Well, I think one of the things that’s most important for sustainable building is to build spaces that are going to look good and function well and flexibly, so that people aren’t compelled to remodel them every five years.

VA: I hate tearing things out of people’s homes that haven’t seen their day yet.  Now people are more conscientious about trying to recycle, not just throwing away the cabinets; but reusing them or selling them, so they aren’t just thrown into a landfill.

San Francisco living room by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by Dean Birinyi.

MN: Right.

VA: But yeah, it’s not an area that I know that much about yet.

MN: Well, that’s one of the good things about our industry — there is life-long learning.

MN: How does travel influence your design aesthetic?  Are you still traveling a lot?

VA: We do.  We go to Vietnam quite a bit, and when we go to Vietnam, we always take another trip somewhere else for the fun of it or to see new things.  We just came back from three weeks in Spain.

MN: Nice.

VA: And Portugal.  We love to travel, and we try to go somewhere at least once a year other than Vietnam, because I go there probably three times a year.  It’s a huge influence.  Going to Spain and getting to see Gaudi’s work in person was incredible.  The details and learning more about his thought process, it’s something you don’t think about.  And just seeing other cultures and other ways of life.  I mean, the Spaniards, they’re so relaxed.

La Sagrada Familia by Antonio Gaudi, Barcelona, Spain

MN: A little bit different than us.

VA: Very different than our culture.  And food to them is so important.  And the way of life is so important.  And here it’s the – the words are slipping from me – what is important is very different; priorities are very different here, for most people.

MN: Do you think that you will try to incorporate more of that gracious lifestyle into your design somehow?

VA: We always do; I think we always do, even if it’s conscious or subconscious.  It’s something that we always incorporate.

We have traveled all over Asia and Europe.  A little bit of South America and Central America.  I was also an exchange student in high school, so I think that’s what also gave me the travel bug.

MN: Where did you go in high school?

VA: I was an exchange student to Sri Lanka, which again it was a very different – extremely different culture.

MN: How did you pick Sri Lanka?

Chapel at Trinity College, Kandy, Sri Lanka, where Vernon studied abroad. Photograph by Isuru Senevi.

VA: I didn’t; it picked me.  I just applied for a year abroad program, and was accepted and I really wanted a French speaking country but I didn’t get it.

Ah, to be in Paris. Photography Copyright Roy Tenant

MN: Do you speak French?

VA: I don’t now, no.  I was learning French in high school.  I now speak Spanish, because afterwards I also lived in Honduras, and that’s where I learned my Spanish.  It comes in handy.

MN: Yes, definitely in this industry, because I took French in high school, and in some ways it seems that I should have taken Spanish, ending up in construction.

VA: Well, I would love to be able to speak French too.  Gioi and I would love to eventually one day have a place in Paris.

MN: Yes, that would be very nice.

VA: So that’s one of our goals.

MN: Good, I support you in that goal!

VA: And that’s something else that we do, we have several offices.  We have an office in Sacramento.  We opened that up mainly because we met someone that came to us and wanted to work for us, but she said, “I live in Sacramento.” She interned with us for awhile and we just really loved her so much that we opened up an office there to keep her.

MN: That’s great.

VA: And it just has really taken off, even in these economic times.  That office there for awhile was actually doing even much better than this office.

VA: We also have an office in Honolulu, and again we had known this person for a long time and always thought, “If we ever open an office there, this is the person that we would want to have run it.”  And so we worked with them there, and we always wanted to travel to Hawaii more, so this gave us the opportunity, plus now we have quite a few projects there.

San Francisco dining room by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by David Duncan Livingston

MN: That’s great.

VA: So maybe we will open an office one day in Paris.

MN: Oh, I think you should.  Don’t delay.  I’ll intern for you.  And you have an office in New York too, is that right?

VA: We have a small office in New York; we don’t have anyone that mans it.  But we have projects in New York right now.

MN: That’s very exciting.

VA: Yeah, we’re very excited about that. That has also helped us through these tough economic times.  It’s sort of diversifying and opening up other new markets for us, and doing it in an economic way also.  We didn’t have to put out a huge investment to open those offices, and it was about the relationships and finding the key people that we want to work with.

MN: Well, so much of this business is just the relationships and the key people.

VA: It is!  One of the people that we get a lot of our stone from came in the other day and we realized that I’ve known her for longer than I’ve known Gioi, and she’s known Gioi longer than he knows me.  We like building a certain set of people that we work well with where the communication, understanding, trust, knowledge and integrity are all there.

MN: Absolutely crucial.

VA: It is extremely crucial, especially when you’re dealing with clients of a certain caliber.  They expect that, because the client doesn’t really care if your window treatment person flakes on you; it’s all your name.  So I know that when they say they’re going to do something, it actually is going to be done.

MN: We have a similar relationship with subcontractors in our company.  We have our precious subcontractors that have worked with us over the years, they know what to expect from us, we know what to expect from them, they stand behind their work, and we stand behind ours.  We’re obviously a subcontractor for a lot of other general contractors as well.  We’re doing both.

VA: I have to say I’ve really enjoyed working with Mueller-Nicholls, I mean, in terms of the kitchen that we did in Orinda.

MN: Which is so beautiful.

Orinda kitchen by Applegate Tran Interiors. Cabinets by Mueller Nicholls. Photography by David Duncan Livingston

VA: It turned out really phenomenal, I have to say.  I know there were many revisions back and forth with the drawings.  That’s something that I really respected and was really thrilled with: You guys took the time to do all the planning and making sure that it was right.  That client was very particular and very demanding (he had every right to be), and he got a product that he can be very happy with.

MN: It was a beautiful job.  That design is fantastic.

VA: And the same with the project that we did in Pacific Heights with you guys.  Again, pushing the envelope; playing with new materials.

Pacific Heights bathroom by Applegate Tran Interiors. Cabinets by Mueller Nicholls. Photography by Rory Earnshaw

VA: And then the project where we worked in conjunction with you and Sozo to do the closets and –

MN: The makeup table.

VA: The makeup table, yeah.

MN: Which I love.

VA: Yeah, that was a really nice piece.

MN: What is one piece of advice that you would give to a general contractor working closely with an interior designer?  How do you make that relationship a success?

VA: It’s all about the communications, and the expectations.  Whenever I have to work with somebody new, especially the general contractor that I’ve never worked with before, I will set some boundaries with the home owner letting them know that there are certain meetings I have to have before the project starts.  We need to establish the protocol of how to deal with the good things and the bad things, so when issues come up – and they always do in a project – we know what paths to take to resolve it.   My goal, even if it’s the most difficult and horrendous issue, is to try to make it seem like it’s a piece of cake.

MN: Piece of cake, yes.  Effortless.

VA: Effortless.  Those are the people that I really enjoy working with -the ones where we can come up with solutions even if we have to deliver bad news to the client.   That’s why I set those meetings in the very beginning, just to talk to the contractor and make sure that we’re all on the same page.  Then there are generally no miscommunications.

MN: Right.  So a lot of this in our industry is just managing expectations from our clients.

VA: Gioi teaches and we always tell young aspiring designers that it’s really just ten percent design.  I only get to do design ten percent of the time, and 90 percent of the time it is administrative and logistics.  You also have to love that.  I love doing design, that’s my real passion, but I do like figuring things out and making sure that things are going to work, whether it’s in design or whether it’s in how we organize ourselves.  Each project is very different.

Piacenza coffee table by Applegate Tran Furniture

MN: Isn’t that amazing?

VA: Yes, and each client is very different, so you have to have a degree in psychology, and business, and you have to be very creative.  You have to be multifaceted.

MN: Absolutely.  Well, we joke a lot about having to be able to act like marriage counselors sometimes.

VA: Yes, and also you have to be a good sales person, and that’s something that is…

MN: A different skill.

VA: And knowing when to really extremely push.  I will tell a client you should get this, and then I’ll show it to them three times.  If they every time knock it down, then the third time I either drop it or I’ll sort of emphasize it that last time and then if they say no, then I will drop it.  Ultimately it’s their home.  You have to respect that it’s about your clients, it’s not about you.

MN: Right, and then also hopefully you do find clients who trust your intuition, your judgment and your depth of knowledge.

VA: There’s always going to be an aspect of every single project, even with clients that give us an open book where they’re going to say, “No.”  We had a client where we wanted to do these concrete floors in a sort of burnt aubergine, and when we showed the wife, she loved it.  The husband looked at it and said, “That reminds me of liver, and I hate liver, and there’s no way we’re doing that in our house.”  So we didn’t do the concrete floors.  I had to back off and figure out a new solution.  That’s the fun part in design.  There’s always many ways you can go about creating a great design for a client.  There’s not just one path.  There’s many different ways.

MN: Good to have that flexibility.

VA: Yes, it is.

MN: That’s a good note to end on.

VA: I think so.

MN: Thank you so much.

2008 Showcase home by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by Chris Stark.

Interviewer: Jill Moran

Jill Moran is a construction professional with 20 years of varied experience in high-end residential remodeling. Her recent entry into motherhood, timed precisely with the downturn in the local construction industry, has resulted in a slight re-engineering of her career.  She currently works closely with the management team at Mueller Nicholls, with an emphasis on communicating to the world at large about residential remodeling.

Gioi Tran

Mueller Nicholls is pleased to present an interview with the multi-talented and fierce Gioi Tran.  Trained as a fine artist, ballet dancer, and interior designer, Gioi is known for the stunning and edgy interiors that come out of the office that he heads up with his partner Vernon Applegate.  Even in this challenging economy, Gioi manages to run a nationally acclaimed design firm, perform, teach, paint, and relax.  Read on to find out how.

MN: So first I’d like to start by thanking you for participating in our interview.  It’s really an honor.

GT: It’s an honor for us as well.

MN: Let’s talk a little bit about your family’s experience leaving Vietnam to come to the U.S., what it’s like to have your family uprooted, and how that has impacted you and how you do design.

GT: I think at an early age it didn’t affect me – I wasn’t traumatized by the whole experience.  I certainly was very excited; it was a fun experience, because as a child, looking back, everything that happened was all kind of a fantasy.  As a child, America is this vision of a dream world, modern and rich and all that stuff.  Talking to my older siblings, they had a much different experience.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where Gioi grew up

MN: Were you the youngest?

GT: I was the youngest, and I had siblings that were in their 20s – early 20s and late 20s, and so their experience is much more dramatic, and they were somewhat traumatized by the whole experience, because they didn’t have a base, but for me as a nine year old child it was all fantasy.  We stayed in a camp for several months.  It wasn’t like we just took a plane and came here to stay in a condo.  We stayed in a camp, and the whole experience was a lot of fun for me.  All of a sudden I had this new-found freedom-  I can go to sleep late, I can get up late, because I wasn’t going to school.  So the whole experience was just fun.

MN: From a nine year old boy’s perspective, I can see how that would be really exciting.

GT: Yeah, and then coming to this country and everything is new and exciting.

MN:: Did you move to San Francisco?

GT: Virginia.

MN: Virginia?  Wow.

GT: Yeah, so I had to deal with the cold, and the humidity.  Well, we had the humidity in Vietnam.  So we lived there for five years, and then after that I moved to Egypt, so that experience –

MN: I did not know that.

Cairo, Egypt, where Gioi lived for four years

GT: Yes, I moved to Egypt when I was 14.

MN: Your whole family moved there?

GT: I had a sister whose husband worked for the state department, and so she was going there, and I said, “Can I come with you?”  And so I did, and I had a great experience there.

MN: Did you go to high school then, there in Egypt?

GT: Yes.

MN: Wow.

GT: I think I had first year eighth grade in elementary and then I went to high school there.

MN: Fantastic!

GT: Then after that I came back to the states, but after that, my whole family had moved to the West, to San Diego.  I didn’t like San Diego, so then I moved farther north and I went to L.A. and didn’t like L.A.  When I came here one day, one time for vacation, it just felt like home.

MN: Home sweet home.

Potrero Hill living room by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by David Duncan Livingston

GT: So I think all that experience obviously does influence my approach to not just design, but everything.

MN: Life in general?

GT: Yes, because I have one sister that’s next to me, we’re about a year apart, and we’re very different in our approach and how we deal with things.  She never traveled – once she came to the states, she went from Virginia to California, San Diego, and she never really traveled.

MN: Never traveled.

GT: So she and I have very different perspectives, and yet we’re very close.  We’re very similar in many ways, her personality and her viewpoint, you know, but I think that the experience of traveling and meeting different cultures makes you much more open.

MN: It really expands your horizons.

GT: Yes.  I think that it has also influenced where my career has taken me.  Interior design is not something I dreamt of as a child, because at that time in elementary or grade school, or high school, it was not a career choice.  I mean, architecture was probably the closest thing.  Interior design wasn’t really an established career in the 70s.  Maybe somebody working in antiques or growing up in the business might become a designer for furniture, or a designer, but it’s not like a career option.  My first influence or first career choice was a painter.

Beauty by Gioi Tran, 60” x 72”, acrylic on canvas

MN: Yes, I see your artwork which is really beautiful.

GT: And ballet, dance.

MN: Did you love to dance when you were a little boy?

GT: No.

MN: Not necessarily.

GT: Fine arts.

MN: Fine arts?

GT: Or just painting.

MN: When you were a kid, you did a lot of painting?

GT: Yeah, even my family said, “You have to be an artist,” because I sketched and drew and I just loved to draw.

MN: Yes, and still today, obviously.

Lastly by Gioi Tran, 30” x 48”, acrylic on canvas

GT: Yes.  And I think, it was not until I was 19 or 20 when I discovered dance, by accident.

MN: By accident?

GT: Yes, because as I was growing up I wasn’t exposed to dance.  One day I was in the community college and I signed up for a tennis class.  They were full, so I still had a two hour block of time before the next class.  So I walked back to my car and went through the gymnasium, and I saw this class and they were jumping up and down dancing, and I thought that looked like fun; it was aerobic, a jazzercise kind of thing.  So I asked the teacher if  I could sign up, and she said, “Sure, come on in.  We’d love to have men in this class.”  I would do jazzercise and aerobics in my gym, so I thought it was the same thing.  But after an hour, I thought, “This is technical.”  They were doing all these steps and choreography, and I told the teacher, “No thank you,” but, and she said, “No, you stay.  I’d love to have men in my class, so can you just stay, please, please?”  I said, “Okay.”  So I stayed.  And after that semester, my teacher said, “You know, you’re really talented.  You have a natural gift.”  I’m like, “Really?”  I mean, when I looked in the mirror I was just awkward to me, because all the girls would do a lot of steps and I’m like, I couldn’t follow the steps; they’d turn right, I’d turn left.

After that class at the community college, my teacher really encouraged me.  She said, “You should take classes – you have natural talent, you have a natural ability, you have natural build, you’re musical, you’re flexible.”  She advised me to take some classes at studios.  So I went to three different studios and all three different studios offered me a scholarship.  My first day of class they said, “You have natural ability.  You turn out, you’re this, you’re that.”  So I said, “Okay.”  So they gave me scholarship.  So I said, okay, so it’s free, doesn’t cost me anything, so I started training in ballet.

MN: And this is in San Diego?

GT: In San Diego.  And then I started dancing professionally a couple years later.

MN: What companies were you dancing with?

GT: I danced with San Diego Ballet.

MN: San Diego Ballet, impressive.

GT: I danced with Los Angeles Ballet.  I was a professional dancer.  But I was more like a guest dancer because I was still pursuing my fine arts, so I was not doing full time at this point.

MN: So you were doing dance and art at the same time?

GT: Yes.  And then when I moved to L.A. I danced with a modern contemporary ballet company called Lula Washington Contemporary Dance Company.  She was a touring company and she said, “If you’re going to dance with me, it has to be full time.”  I said, “That’s fine, I’ll just figure out a way to make money.”  Because you don’t get paid.

MN: That’s the truth.

San Francisco Loft Stripped Bath

GT: So we made it work, because most of the time when she tours like a four day weekend, so that kind of worked around my schedule.  I was working as a waiter which had more flexibility.  And I was doing fine arts, so interior design didn’t even come into play.  At some point I thought, “I need to have another career.”  Because I started dancing much later, I knew was never going to be at this level (raises hand above his head), it’s just not going to happen, know what I mean?

MN: Even for people that start young it’s very hard to get to the absolute top level.

GT: Very hard.  So I thought, “What’s another option as a career?”  By this time I had already moved to San Francisco, so I checked out the Academy of Art University.  At that time it was called Academy of Art College, and I thought, you know, maybe I’ll go into advertising, graphic design, fashion design…  They also had interior design.  I signed up for the orientation, and it happened that interior design was the first presentation, so I went into the orientation and at that time the director was just very excited and very passionate about the industry, and interior design.

San Francisco’s Academy of Art University

MN: Who was the director at that time?

GT: Martha Miller.

MN: Martha, okay.

GT: She has moved around, I think now she works at Cañada College, she was director down there for awhile.  And so she was really excited, and I was like, “Oh, I can do this.”  She’s said, “You can make a lot of money…”

MN: (Laughs)

GT: You can, but not everybody can.

MN: No, it’s a difficult field.

GT: She said, “It’s really glamorous,” and she got me really excited, so I signed up for the program.

MN: Were you still dancing at that time, or had you already –

GT: Yes.

MN: Were you dancing with the San Francisco Ballet at that time?

GT: No.  I’m not good enough to dance with the San Francisco Ballet.

MN: That’s pretty high end.

GT: By that time I wasn’t really doing ballet, I was doing ballroom, contemporary dance, and modern.  I stopped dancing right when we started our business years ago.  So I was just taking some classes.  But six months ago I was contacted, and this was my performance (hands interviewer photo).

Photo of Gioi (second from right) dancing at The Spring Dance

MN: Six months ago?

GT: Six months ago I started dancing again.

MN: That’s awesome.

GT: This performance was in April.

MN: What is this performance?  Tell me about it.

GT: There’s a dance that happens once a year called The Spring Dance , and it was started by UCSF to raise money for pediatric cancer patients.  So annually they do this performance and this collage of different dances.  Companies have to audition to get into the program and the director of has her own pieces.  So then she asked me to volunteer my time to perform in this.  This is my first performance in eleven years!

MN: Congratulations, that’s terrific!

GT: It took me six months to get back in shape.

MN: Well, of course.  I mean, dancing is very intense activity.  So is this is a kind of a modern ballet?

GT: This is actually more classical ballet piece.

MN: More classical ballet?  So it was choreographed by the director of the fundraising event?

GT: Yes, actually she hired a choreographer to come in and choreograph this piece with her general direction.

MN: So what was it like to fit in learning this piece while you’re still running a business?

GT: It was great, because it comes around full circle. That’s what I tell my students, because I also teach at the Academy of Art University, I’m an instructor there.

MN: That’s great.

GT: Crazy.  Crazy schedule.

MN: You have a lot on your plate.

GT: So I always tell them: “In life, it’s good to have some idea of what you want to do, but be open to what’s out there, and everything that you do in your life is going to come around full circle, everything you learn!” I’ve had many experiences – I worked for a law firm, I’ve worked for a German manufacturer, Miele-

Miele dishwasher

MN: Oh, really?

GT: Yeah, I worked for Miele for about eight years.

MN: What were you doing with Miele?

GT: I started out running the showroom, and then I started helping with marketing; I used to do cooking demonstrations for their products and then I started doing product training.  I wore a lot of hats working for them.  But all that experience – being a waiter, being a bartender, dancing, doing fine arts – they all encompass what I do today.  I draw from all of it – sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, sometimes subconsciously – it all comes together.  My whole approach to our business practice and how we work with clients are all influenced by the attractions I’ve had in dance and living for the arts.  You have to be very disciplined.  Especially in ballet, because in ballet, it’s all about progression of steps.  It’s like learning your ABC’s.  You can’t write a paragraph unless you know your ABC’s – you learn your vowels and your consonants.  In ballet, you can’t just come in overnight and start dancing.

MN: Right.

GT: You have to learn all this vocabulary and you have to do these exercises over and over, three hours a day, tendus, tendus, dégagé, tendus, pliés.  And then you connect all of these pieces and eventually it all becomes a beautiful dance, but all this training has to happen first.  So you can’t go out there and just improvise, it’s all very mechanical components.  You take those mechanical components and create this beautiful choreography that inspires somebody.  So all of that has to do with all the things I do today.  You have to be disciplined, you have to be organized.  I think everything in life effects how you are today.  All of your experiences.  Everything you do does come back later.

Photography by Sheila Price

MN: Do you feel like you kind of have the same internal creative process, whether it’s dance or painting or interior design for a client, or are there different avenues that you go down internally?

GT: I think that they’re not different that way, because your past experience obviously has a big input, but also your makeup, and who you are as a person.  Like for me – I’m not patient, even though I’ve had to have all this training, but I do it quicker.  So for somebody who it would take five years, I’m going to do it in two years, because I don’t have the patience.  I process a lot very quickly: I think quick, I throw quick, and I get it out there.  Vernon [Gioi's partner] on the other hand is very methodical.  Like you ask Vernon, give me an opinion about that (points to keys on table), he’ll just absorb it, he’ll take it and then walk away, and then come back.  He’s not going to give you an opinion.  He’s going to say, “I need to think about it, I need to find out more.”  You ask me, I’m like, “Oh, okay, well I think this has a really cool texture, but these should be MWB and not BMW.”   I would do it like this (snaps his fingers really quickly) and I think fast.  But that’s my nature.

Firebird by Gioi Tran, 36” x 60”, acrylic on canvas

MN: Does that show up in your painting?  Do you feel like you paint really fast?

GT: I paint that way too, and that’s why when you see my painting it’s broad strokes, it’s big, it’s textural.  It’s not delicate.  When I see paintings that are delicate with a wash, with a lightness and transparent qualities I love it, because that’s not something I can do.  I need to hit it, I need to make it bold.  I can’t do watercolor.  I took training in Chinese painting, and it’s dip, dip, dip, stroke (mimics painting a single curved brush stroke on pretend paper),  done.  For me it’s like, I need to like (mimics dipping brush into paint, and then scribbling over the first brush stroke) – you know what I mean?  Because it’s one stroke and you have to plan ahead.  And for me a lot of time I don’t plan ahead; it’s not my makeup.  I like to experiment.

MN: Take things as they come?

GT: I take risks.  I throw it and if it doesn’t work, who cares; it doesn’t matter.  It’s only a canvas.

MN: And that’s also really good when you’re dealing with clients, because if you have an idea and they don’t like that idea, then you have another idea right away.

GT: But saying that – that’s why when we have a project Vernon and I assess who should do this project, based on time availability, our schedule, and personality.  Because I think that’s really important. But even if I have a client that needs to be organized and all that stuff, I then have to train myself and with that project be more structured, be more timely, be more – slow it down, not go so quick.  So I think our makeup is also another factor in how we approach the design process.  But then at some point you know your strengths and weaknesses.

Ocean Front living room by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by David Duncan Livingston

MN: That’s one of the good things about having more years on the planet.

GT: Maturity.  Yeah, so that’s okay.  I’ll do this when it’s needed, but I know that’s not my strength.  I’ll take on this client knowing that probably we’re not the most compatible, but then I have to adjust, because they’re the client.  So this is a business, I want to make sure that they’re happy, and I’ve adjusted to them.

MN: Do you find that having things like instant messaging, instant communication, and the internet availability have worked really well for you?  Do you have constant communication with clients so you can get instant answers?

GT: I don’t know any difference I guess, because when we started business, I think that technology was already there.  I mean, now it’s even more so, before it was just maybe faxes and email, but now it’s texting, it’s more of that.

MN: Do you do a lot of texting with your clients?

GT: Yeah.  There are a couple.  Again, certain clients operate in certain ways.  With this client, they’re best at communication through email; with this one you’ve got to make a phone call.  Or face to face.  I had this client in Hawaii, and, we had all these issues, endless emails back and forth, and it just became complicated.  The minute we got face to face, we came to agreement within ten minutes, done.  With two months of this back and forth email, nothing got accomplished.

Can you hear me now?

MN: Email can go either way, because it can be very useful and convenient, but it can also get into this morass of no decisions being made, especially when you have a lot of parties participating.

GT: Well, there were issues that came up and I think then he became emotional about it, I became emotional about the emails just escalated it.

MN: Escalated, yes.

GT: With the face to face meeting I said, “Frank, I’m here to do this for you.”  And he said, “Yeah, I’m sorry I sent that email, I’m sorry I pushed you.”  But overall we like technology.  Technology is good.

MN: We’ve been using technology a lot to communicate information electronically.

GT: We have to have paperwork just because there are things that we physically have to have – drawings, sketches – but I personally like using the emails, because I’m much more organized and able to see things for clients, because on paper I lose things.

MN: Do you have some clients that will come to you specifically because you are an artist and you have a fine arts background, and so they want to be able to have that influence in their interior design?

Potrero Hill dining room with paintings by Gioi Tran. Photography by David Duncan Livingston

MN: No, and also it’s not known – I mean, people don’t know I used to be a dancer.  A lot of people don’t know I’m an artist.  I have clients that say, “I saw this painting, who’s the artist?”  I’ll say, “Oh, it’s me.”  Then they say, “Oh, I didn’t know you’re an artist.”  We don’t really promote it here.  I promote it separately.  I have two galleries that represent my work, ArtHaus is one of them, and the other one is Paige Gallery.  So I promote it separately.  But it’s not on our main website.  I think eventually I should, because we had one client that hired us four years ago and she contacted us because she did a Google search and found out that I was Vietnamese, and that appealed to her.  So obviously it’s a good idea for my art, too, since it does draw people in.  I think it’s good to let people know who we are as people outside of our interior design business.

Gioi in the Delta near Ho Chi Minh City, near his childhood home

MN: Well, I think that it really helps clients.  They may not know that it helps them, but just the fact that you have all these different backgrounds, living in three different countries when you were growing up and having the world-wide perspective –

GT: And traveling a lot.

MN: And the traveling that you have done, and the fact that you have the dance experience and the fine art experience – I think when you’re trying to create a home for somebody, drawing on all of those experiences gives somebody a better home.

GT: But also, outside from the design, for me personally, being a dancer and a struggling artist for many years, I kind of have a different approach when it comes to designing space.  It’s not life or death.  Obviously I take it seriously from the sense of making sure that we provide excellent service to our clients, but I just kind of have a laid back approach in terms of saying, “It’s okay.”

MN: It’s just a kitchen.

GT: It’s just a kitchen.  I don’t take myself so seriously.

Orinda kitchen by Applegate-Tran Interiors. Photography by David Duncan Livingston

MN: Well, it sounds like you have less ego involvement with it.

GT: Look: We work in beautiful spaces, certain days that it’s very glamorous, travel here, doing that, shopping – but for the most part you’re working for somebody.  You’re schlepping stuff.  It’s like, you know, it’s not a big deal.

MN: Vernon mentioned that the job of an interior designer involves ten percent design, and then –

GT: 95 percent organization.

MN: 90 or maybe 95 percent other things that you’re doing, like schlepping or making phone calls or ordering things, managing an office –

GT: Yeah, I picked this fabric but now when we call it’s discontinued.

MN: No longer available, yes.

GT: Or it’s 20 percent silk, we can’t use that, or I showed it to the client and she loved it but, oh, the price, it’s 120 dollars a yard.

MN: There’s a lot of back and forth.

Cinnabar fabric by Highland Court

GT: For one piece of fabric!  Twenty hours later…

MN: Yeah, there’s a lot of research involved, and people don’t realize how much time it takes to choose a fabric for three pillows or something like that.  Probably at this point you don’t experience difficulty invoicing for those kind of things and explaining to clients what you’re doing, but I’m sure people starting out –

GT: It depends on the client.

MN: Yes.

GT: If we find out that they’ve never gone through this process, then we explain the process, we go through the process; this is how it’s going to work.  We tell them that the first phase it’s going to be X amount of hours or X amount of time.  So we educate them, in the beginning or along the way.  We show them boards and examples of other projects, and we explain that the whole process took about two and a half months.

MN: Well, there’s a lot of education in our field, and you teach as well?

GT: Yes.

MN: And I also noticed that there’s a book that you’re involved with called Starting Your Career as an Interior Designer.  I read a lot of the book actually – it’s a really good book.  But how did those guys find you, and what was it like to participate in that project?

GT: You know, people just call – I constantly get emails because we’re everywhere.  I just got an email today from Academy of Art University.  They’re putting out a catalog and each department chose one instructor that has some kind of a voice, so they interviewed me.  I also just got an email from somebody who’s moving here from the East Coast and they want to go to school and they want to ask me about my career and the industry.  The word is just out there.

MN: Right.  Well, the Academy of Art University named you as alumni of the year in 2007 – that was a very nice honor.

GT: They had their commencement and I was there with my cap and they showed pictures of my projects and my accomplishments – it was really cool.

San Francisco Loft by Applegate-Tran Interiors. Photography by David Duncan Livingston

MN: I kind of assumed when I saw that and saw you in the book that you must get calls all the time from aspiring designers.  When you are teaching, do you teach actual design and also how to handle the business end of it?

GT: I always throw that in, because I think that’s important.  I teach a kitchen and bath class, that’s the name of the course.  But I want to come into class the first five minutes and I tell them what’s going on with my world, so they can see it’s not always glamorous.  Issues can come up that are beyond your control.  One day I showed up and I just had an awful phone call from a client in New York City, he was so upset because four pieces of furniture arrived and three were damaged.  Usually when it happens here we don’t let the client see it.   We see it damaged, we don’t sign, the guys take it back to the warehouse, and we figure out how to make it work. In New York City we’re not there, so the delivery people left it and dropped it and left it in the condo.

MN: You try to protect your client.

GT: Yes.

MN: We do that a lot too.

GT: In that case, that happened on the way to class, so of course when I came to class, I let the students know what’s going on in my world.  I think that’s important.

MN: I appreciated this book because it’s a nuts and bolts kind of approach for someone who’s trying to start out in the design profession, geared toward interior designers, and it’s a lot of very practical advice.  Your field has a reputation for being glamorous, and they (the authors) say, “No, it’s not glamorous.”

Audrey Hepburn

GT: It’s not glamorous.

MN: Maybe one day out of the year it will be glamorous.

GT: Well, you don’t go into the field thinking that your ultimate goal to be a celebrity.  Out of 100 students, only five will be working as a designer, and out of five, only .01 percent will have a name in the industry, or will have the clientele that really make them shine and let them do whatever you want.

MN: Right.

GT: But most of the case it’s day in, day out, you’re problem solving.

MN: It’s a job.

GT: It’s a job.  You’re problem solving.  They don’t have enough storage; you have to provide enough storage.  There’s not enough lighting.  They hire you to coordinate so they don’t have to worry about it.  Like today I went to the job site because the client’s going to go out of the country for three weeks.  All these things need to be done, and guess who’s going to have to get them done?

MN: You.

GT: Who’s going to have to be the bad guy to go in and say, “This is not on time”?  That’s not glamorous.

MN: Was that surprising when you found that out?

MN: I have to say yes, and that’s why I tell the students, “You know, you see me now and I have an office here, I have an office in Hawaii, I do these projects, but there’s a lot behind the scenes, but it took me a long time to get here.”

Living room by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by David Duncan Livingston

MN: Right.

GT: After I graduated from design school, I didn’t go to work right away because after my internship, I thought, “This sucks!  It doesn’t pay very much, it’s all this paperwork, working the library, doing production work; I don’t get to see the big picture…”  So then I went to work for a law firm for two years, because I needed to make money.  Then, after two years of working in a law firm, I said, “Okay, I’ve got to do something with interior design because that’s what I went to school for.”  I have to say even at that time it wasn’t a passion, because I’d really never experienced what the industry is about.  I just thought for practical purposes I should give design another chance.  So I went to work for a design firm, but I couldn’t make enough money working full time, so I worked for them part time and also for Miele.

MN: Oh, okay.

GT: Then I worked for Miele full time, but I went to them and said, “You know what? I need flexibility.  That’s the only way I can take this job.”  I came in at ten or eleven o’clock, worked ‘til five or sometimes four, and had one day off a week during the week to go my design firm.   Design is what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t afford to work full time in interior design, it was not paying enough.  I made it work.  I tell my students you’ve got to be creative.  If this is what you want to do, you can make it, but it’s not going to be easy.  You’re going to make ten dollars and hour, and you’ve got to work your way up.  Because interior design is a big deal! I’m not going to have you design something, because it’s going to cost me money – I mean, you might design something that’s going to fall or doesn’t fit –it’s a big liability.  When you’re a designer, you’re not going to get a job where you just start designing and installing, it’s just not going to happen.  You’re going to get bits and pieces until you can connect all these bits and pieces, and then you can get to do the whole thing.  So for years, I didn’t get the whole thing; I got bits and pieces.  So for many years I still didn’t know what interior design was really about, because I working for a designer I didn’t get to see the whole picture.  It was just, “Okay, you can sketch some ideas for this,” “Oh, go out and find other fabric that coordinates with the orange and green for me, I want some stripes,” “Okay, take this and go.”  I was doing all these bits and pieces.

"I want stripes!"

MN: Little research kind of things.

GT: To answer your question, even three, four years into the business working for someone else I still didn’t know; not until we had our own business.  Then it’s like, “Oh, that’s a lot of paperwork, that’s a lot of follow-up!”  You know?  Right?

MN: When did you start your own business then?

GT: Eleven years ago.

MN: Did you go straight from working for the other designer, or –

GT: When I met Vernon, he was an interior designer, and right away I said, “Okay, if we’re going to start dating and living together, we have to have our own design business.”  At that time, I was working juggling both jobs.  Vernon was ready to start his own business, but he was just barely started.  He had one client.  He said, “Why don’t we start our own business, Applegate Tran Interiors?”  So I stayed and kept my full-time job with Miele, so instead of working with somebody else, I went to work with Vernon on the side, and then I actually stayed and worked with Miele for another six years before I came full-time here.

MN: That’s a more realistic trajectory for a student to expect, to have another job – it’s kind of like trying to be an artist or trying to be a dancer.  Our society doesn’t really support the arts in any way.  Some interior designers can be successful, but in general I think it’s very hard for an interior designer.

GT: It’s very hard.  You have to figure out other ways to get through that first five, six years. You have to figure it out because it’s hard to graduate from school and say, “Okay, I’m going to go out and get a full-time job and have a career right away,” Some can, maybe by working for a big architecture firm or big interior design firm like Gensler and Associates, but again, even at a bigger firm they only have 30, 40 employees.  And how many firms are there?

MN: Not a lot.

GT: Right.  Out of the country, maybe 100.  So there’s not –

MN: There aren’t not a lot of job openings.

GT: There are a lot of designers out there, but even the successful ones can’t have a big staff of 20 people; it doesn’t happen.

MN: No.  Definitely not.

GT: We’re a big firm for an interior design firm.

MN: How many people do you have?

GT: I think we have six.

San Francisco Loft by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by Dean Birinyi.

MN: Does that include all your different offices?

GT: Yes.  Each office only has one person, and then I have assistants, and interns, and sometimes a designer on a project basis.  It’s a lot to juggle.

MN: It is a lot.  But now that you have your own business and you’re working here full time, are you getting to experience more of the passion for interior design?

GT: I love what we do.  I just have to step back because I think day to day it gets overwhelming, so I always step back and say, “You know, I’m pretty lucky.”

MN: Yes.

GT: The other day I took a client to an event, and after we went out for dinner, she said, “Gioi, people just love you guys!  Everyone has respect for you and you’re just out there and you have such a great reputation,” and I was like, “Yeah!”  I have to step back and say not all designers are able to have what we have, having clients that allow us to do wonderful spaces, or having the ability to travel.  A lot of what we do is going to different places, like having clients in New York.  Also, I went shopping four months ago to China with a client, things like that.  The hard part is having projects that go south or clients sometimes just not being reasonable.

MN: Well, there’s always that in any business.

GT: But you know what, I’ve gone through three really hard clients in the last two years, and learned so much from it!  In the beginning I was panicked.  But now when these things happen, I just assess the situation, know my rights, and if I didn’t cover it in my contract, I have to eat it.  If it’s in the contract, I’m going to stick by it.  I’m not going to get upset.  I am going to get sleep over the weekend.  I realize, going through what I went through with other tough clients, somehow it’s going to work out.  You know?  It’s just furniture, right?

oooommmm

MN: Exactly.

GT: So when you deal with all these stressful situations, when it happens, I just step back and say, “Hey, assess it.  Come up with solutions one, two and three.  At some point you’ll have only one option, and that will be your only option, this is it.”  I think going through all that experience really helped me, so when things happen I step back, say, “Give me a minute, we do this, we do that.  Done.”  So we can’t avoid – it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in business.  You can’t avoid it – you can’t control somebody else.

MN: No, you can’t.  That’s one of the interesting things about our industry is that you have all this responsibility, but very little control.

GT: Yes, true.

MN: So it can be very thrilling, can’t it?

GT: Well, I’ve got to go.  Do you mind?

MN: No, not at all.  So thank you very much for participating, it’s really been an honor.

Kitchen by Applegate Tran Interiors. Photography by Chris Stark

Interviewer: Jill Moran

Jill Moran is a construction professional with 20 years of varied experience in high-end residential remodeling. Her recent entry into motherhood, timed precisely with the downturn in the local construction industry, has resulted in a slight re-engineering of her career.  She currently works closely with the management team at Mueller Nicholls, with an emphasis on communicating to the world at large about residential remodeling.

Mueller Nicholls worked with John Wheatman on this San Leandro project

John Wheatman. Photograpy by David Wakely

The Bay Area is blessed to have John Wheatman, an internationally acclaimed interior designer with more than thirty-five years of interior design experience under his belt. He’s taught interior design for over forty years, both locally and abroad. He is renowned for both his fantastic design vision, as well as his wonderful joie de vivre.

On May 13^th, 2010, Mueller Nicholls joined John Wheatman at his home in San Francisco for a lively interview, discussing his life, his family, his major influences, and life in general.  The morning began with a viewing of several of John’s children’s books, including a rare complete edition of an Alphabet book filled with woodcuts by Sir William Nicholson (1872-1949).

Woodcut by Sir William Nelson (ca 1898)

Below are excerpts from our conversation.

MN: We’ve asked about the early influences that led you towards design.

JW: I was always involved [in design]. My father at one time had a company in Seattle, Washington, called Hemsloyd Studios, and I have a couple of things that he had commissioned. So I was introduced in our home to that.  We also had an interest in an art school, with Ernest Norling, who was at that time a very famous artist in the Pacific Northwest.

I was in art school before I was five, and I vividly remember my first day in kindergarten. Both my father and his two brothers had gone to the same school, when they were little, and the room had an impact. There was an illustration of George Washington, there was an illustration of Abraham Lincoln and then there was an illustration from Hills Brothers Coffee, so you saw the gentleman in the long robes.

All the shades were up at the bottom, so you couldn’t be distracted by the outside, but you could still see the tops of trees. You were introduced to working with materials, water colors and the like, in kindergarten. It was always great to be able to do something and to be praised for what you had accomplished.

Ernest Norling (1892-1974), Untitled Lake Union Scene c.1920’s, Oil on Board, 12 x 17

Way back then there was a corner grocery store a block away from where my grandmother’s house was. Both my parents were working; this was in the height of the Depression.

MN: So this was also in Washington?

JW: In Washington- Seattle. And [we knew] the lady who had the grocery store. Lipton’s tea would do a window with crepe paper, streamers and all that sort of thing, and when it would come time to take it down and put up something else I would get all the stuff and I’d work with it.

MN: In the window, yourself?

JW: No, in my home – my grandmother’s home. Both parents were working. I could walk to school, come home for lunch, listen to Ma Perkins, or what have you, and get back in time [for class]….So my imagination was stimulated all the time. It was wonderful!

That grew as time went by. There would be an open house in school and I’d be asked to do one of the murals in the hallway or the stage set. Then with the boy scouts, I got involved in making the flower floats and participating in parades.  It was just a constant part of me.

My parents planned and built a house and I had a very private room, which I was able to begin to acquire things for.

MN: Was that in San Mateo?

JW: In San Mateo. I did a lot of babysitting. Every once in awhile, somebody would be running out of money and I would admire something and they’d give me Victorian pedestal, or I’d be given a print in lieu of a payment.

MN: Early barter system!

JW: Right. And so while I was in high school, I also was introduced to Mr. Dengler who framed prints in Burlingame. So I began to save money and to buy them. I can take you into the kitchen and show you some of the earliest pictures that I ever bought.

Herb Dengler, Portola Valley biologist, artist, and naturalist (1912 – 2002)

MN: From high school?

JW: From high school. And my room was special. It wasn’t big; it was ten and a half by eleven. It had two windows and it looked out onto a field. There was nothing between my house in San Mateo and the adjoining community except cows. And now it’s filled with schools and houses and all of that kind of thing.

Along the way also, I learned to be a gardener.  When you’re gardening, you don’t just plant vegetables, you plant flowers. And so you become aware of how to arrange them, and how to mix them and how to plant them.

MN: This is just in your blood.

JW: Yes! If I turn back the bed spread in my bedroom there is a quilt that my grandmother made. She was always making these beautiful, beautiful, beautiful quilts. I was [always] involved with creativity. Eating, drinking, growing, art schools — I just did it. I didn’t think about it, I just did it. I can remember one day seeing these two big garage doors against the building at school. I didn’t realize that the shop instructor had brought his garage doors to be re-fitted. I took them and used them as a stage set background for Romeo and Juliet. He went to the play and saw his garage doors!

That was the name of the game.

MN: Were all your friends doing that, too?

JW: Many. We didn’t have a lot of distractions that you have at the present time in growing up. We were also introduced in 1939 to the fair, on Treasure Island. I saw the mysteries of culture.  I went 19 times.

San Francisco Worlds Fair, 1939

We moved at that time to San Mateo. And I can remember we had enough house guests that I used the sun porch for my bedroom (I loved it!).  There was a housekeeper — we took the housekeeper home and two people could sleep in her room and somebody could sleep on the sofa. My father pulled out the tent with three-foot high wood walls so you could have a couple of beds there. One night I [even] had to sleep on the lawn because we were just invaded with people. And so there was the magic of food and drink and the constant preparation for entertaining.

MN: For entertaining, enjoying life.

JW: To the utmost.

(Conversation turns towards the restaurant that John’s mother managed, the Blue Boar, and returns to his time in Korea).

JW: Everything had to do in some form with what I do today. There was no break in it. None. And it was fun! Even when I was the army, I did the landscaping for the Battalion area in Seoul, Korea. I helped get the community together to celebrate Christmas with us, so I designed the nativity set with three-foot-high figures. We used parachutes for table cloths. I designed venereal disease posters, “She may look clean, but…” There was never any question that this was not going to be a part of your life.

MN: Right.

JW: And ours was a flexible house (in San Mateo). There was a fire place in the back porch, and there were two picnic tables and four benches so they could be made into a long table, or they could be a square table. Or one [table] could be a buffet and one could be a table. Singing, telling stores around the fire place; big masses of flowers on top of them that were grown in our yard and grapes hanging from the arbor above. And the barbecue was unlike anybody else’s barbecue because when the grill went down it was filled with plants and it looked like a planter. That was my father. I learned how to dig post holes and to put fences in and lay brick and everything. We wired the house together.

John Wheatman, his father, and their dog "Rags," 1926

MN: You and your dad did that?

JW: Yes.

MN: When you built the house?

JW: When we built the house, yeah.

MN: So he was also a renaissance man.

JW: Yes, he was good.  It was fun.

(Conversation meanders around the topic of John’s sister, and what it’s like to care for aging family memebers).

MN: One of the things I remember when I took your class was you had a couple of  points about eggs. One of the things you said is that you keep your eggs in a basket in the refrigerator because it looks nice.

JW: Yes, that’s correct. The basket is there now and it’s empty!  (Laughs).

MN: Well, I should have brought eggs.

JW: No, I think there’s a piece of fruit in it, so it’s being used.

MN: Well,  I was inspired by that, so our eggs are in a basket.

JW: It’s nice, they look fresher don’t they?

MN: They look fresher and they look nice.  I also remember you said you had chickens at your house.

Kitchen by John Wheatman. Photography by David Wakely

JW: Oh, yes.

MN: So maybe the eggs came from the chicken, and then you would use the eggs, keep the shells, dry them out in the oven and then you’d use them for fertilizer.

JW: The chickens ate the crushed shells.

MN: That’s what I thought. I love that kind of attention to the smallest and most humble detail…and also the cycle of life and not throwing something away.

JW: We didn’t have garbage.  We did not have garbage.  Once in a while we bought a can of dog food, but the dog ate the scraps from the table.  We had a garbage can, but it was almost always empty, because all the clippings went back into the earth and were turned over again and the manure was turned into it and it was productive.

MN: Well, it’s interesting because you probably saw that one of our questions was a question about sustainability. Your practice has always had kind of an ideologically unencumbered approach to sustainability, where it’s just very practical, you don’t throw things away. You re-use things.  You work in a small space, that’s not a problem; you don’t have to have a big house. And that’s always been a part of your lifestyle, which is fantastic.

JW: That’s right. No, it’s good! When Mary and I lived in Oakland, our bed was in the front room.  There was a front room and a parlor and people would say, “Where’s your bedroom? Where do you sleep?”  [We had] a box-spring tightly upholstered, covered, tightly tailored, and there were books all around it, and there was a fire, with a fire in the fire place. Mary got up first every morning and she’d have the john! (Laughs)

MN: You have to have these things worked out in a marriage!

(Conversation turns to John’s early studios, more about his time in Korea, and then to studying design).

MN: So there’s probably not really a beginning [to the career in design].

Faculty of San Mateo Junior College- Jack Daniels (Art) is at far left, front row; Donna Davis (Art) is second from right, front row (ca 1940)

JW: No, it just started and it flowed. When I was in school, I really knew that I wanted to be involved in interior design. So I took all the art classes that I could.  Jack Daniels and Donna Davis were brilliant teachers. I learned a lot from them, and we became friends. The pictures in the hallway are a gift from Donna Davis; I had them framed as the first gift for this house. I think of her often.

MN: She was a professor at the University of Washington?

JW: No, this was at San Mateo Junior College. She was outstanding, outstanding.  I had pictures of her at parties at my house with all of the students in the class all in the living room. It was that kind of household.

Before I left school there, I did a one man show. And I had taken enough classes that I made all the furniture.

MN: You made the furniture, wow!

JW: I made the furniture. My aunt came to check me out with my father and my mother about ten o’clock at night the night before it was to open and she said, “You don’t have any carpets, you need carpets.” I said, “I can’t weave a carpet at this time of day!” (Laughs boisterously). And she said, “I have some carpets, one will fit here and one will fit there.” I said, “You just got them two days ago.” And she said, “No, and I’ve enjoyed them.”

MN: Wow, what a nice gift!

JW: So they were brought in and they added the softness the space required.  So you learned from everybody.

(Conversation turns to the ups and downs of working in the current economy, and the closing of the Wheatman showroom in 2009, and then returns to his time at the University of Washington).

MN: So you’ve been doing this for such a long time, and it’s in your blood, and you’ve had education…

Photo from Windmere, home that Hope Foote designed for herself

JW: Big time education — very very good education, at the University of Washington, School of Architecture. It was totally mesmerizing, fabulous. And then to be introduced to Hope Foote, and to have put my foot in it…There were I think 72 of us in this initial lecture area. And she said “What might one think of putting on the chairs and on the window treatment here?” And I said, “You could seriously consider using the same fabric on both.” And she said, and this is day ONE, “That is a cheap decorator’s trick (scathing tone of voice).”

MN: Interesting.

JW: So I learned to find my place on day one. Her last criticism was even better.  Now, we were down to 12 seniors in this class.

MN: Out of 72?

JW: Out of 72, and I knew that I’d done a better job than anybody. What I had done was absolutely perfect. I mean, there wasn’t anything at fault with it. And I couldn’t understand why she didn’t pick on mine first, but she held mine off for last. She said, “What period is this?” I said, “Third period, early American.” She said, “What period is Mount Vernon?” I said, “The same.” And she said, “Chickens would not look comfortable in this room.” And I said, “Miss Foote, I don’t understand.” She said, “Well, when I was lecturing on the east coast, and I was visiting Mount Vernon, chickens wandered into the corner, and they didn’t look out of place. Your project is perfect, it doesn’t allow for the unexpected.”

MN: Interesting, what did you think of that?

JW: I thought I’d get drunk!

MN: Did you get drunk?

JW: Well, not drunk, but — I had to learn that you have to be able to know that you can change a child’s diaper on a dining room table! You have to be able to know that the ashes don’t have to be emptied to have a fine fireplace. You have to be able to know that yes, you should throw out the flowers, but they were given to you by a friend and there are a couple that are still fresh so let the bouquet stay.

An example of object grouping from Mr. Wheatman's home. Photography by David Wakely.

MN: Can I ask more about your senior project and Hope’s comment about the chicken? Was there something small you could have changed about the room so chickens could have looked more comfortable, or is that too literal?

JW: No, no, no; what happened I guess it was too precise. You see, if you look over at that drum (points to small table), the housekeeper was here yesterday (gets up, moves objects closer together), that looks better because you see one.

MN: Because they’re more connected?

JW: Right, doing that, you see two (moves objects apart again). Bringing that in, and then also getting it back a little bit like that (rearranges objects again) so this space is different than this space; and that space is different than that space. Or, there are three objects here; this one, this one and this one and they’re very happy together. Here again, just a tiny bit makes a big difference. You see (referencing senior project again), perhaps I could have had a shawl over the back of the sofa, or a pillow slightly askew, just to say that nothing’s perfect.

MN: Right, interesting.

JW: But to have a teacher do that.

MN: Yes.

Jack Lenor Larsen Fabric on chair

JW: When she knew that her life was coming to an end and others found out, we gathered from all over the world and went up to Seattle to applaud her. Jack Lenor Larsen led the pack. If it weren’t for her, he wouldn’t have gotten the scholarship that he had and become the institution that he has become.MN: We had asked about a person who most influenced your design vision, seems like a silly question because your influences are so vast, and there are so many people…

JW: They go all over the place. When we first moved to San Francisco, the three of us were tourists. At that time the, De Young Museum was there but it wasn’t that popular.

There was one room that had windows, and the windows were usually left open, so on a rainy day the smell of Eucalyptus leaves came into the room. And the floors were painted and the walls were painted, and when you walked on the floors the floors squeaked. I had never walked on floors where the floors squeaked. This is impressive! I was going to Alvarado grammar school here in San Francisco and every week we were tourists.

17th century dollhouse of Petronella Oortman- Rijksmuseum, Netherlands

There’s a beautiful chest there at the present time, and it’s sort of roped off, but at that time the guard would say, “Wanna see inside?” And he’d open up the doors, and he’d pull out the drawers and show me all the secret compartments in this great Renaissance piece of furniture! Because of that I can take you in my mind through rooms at various museums beyond belief. I can climb up the ladder [in my mind] and look into a doll house in Amsterdam, in the Rijksmuseum, which has been closed now for renovation for too long a period of time, but maybe the next time I will be there I’ll be able to do the same thing as I did ages ago, half a century ago.  Amazing!

MN: It is amazing. It’s very inspirational. I know that you’ve inspired countless numbers of people.

JW: I’ve had the good fortune of being a good teacher. It’s Just like the woman who is being judged for our court (U.S. Supreme Court). She said, “I am a GREAT teacher.”  And to be able to know in a non-bragadocious fashion, that I can get people to open their minds to things that they’d never considered — when it comes to space in a world that’s getting closer and closer, that means a lot.

(Conversation turns towards a current project in Carmel, and then to John’s garden and how it’s visually connected to the living room).

San Leandro project 2007

MN: Well, that brings to mind a project that you worked on with Mueller Nicholls. It was this very small room in San Leandro, a nothing room, and you did the same thing. You added beams into the room and the beams continued into the mullions in the large windows and then that continued in the trellis. And then posts for the trellis were mounted on the garage, which was about five feet away and you put mirrors in between [the posts]. And it’s just amazing. It’s an incredible transformation, which is why we love remodeling!

JW: It’s good!

MN: It’s fantastic!

JW: What you have to do to have to have a totally open mind. People who live in this building have command over huge views, not the second floor, not this floor, but on up. However, many people in the building really appreciate the warmth and intimacy of my space.

MN: What would be your greatest hope for what your work in interior design and creating spaces could do for the world?

JW: I think any time anybody can in some way open other people’s minds to the prospect of pleasure as a result of what you’re able to do, is one of the greatest rewards that you can have. It’s just wonderful, the glee that people have. And sometimes it’s just a tiny space, or it can be a huge space.

(Conversation meanders around more diverse topics, like a project in Ireland, and then more reminiscing about his shop on Union Street, and how design can help people with transitions in life).

JW: It (the shop on Union Street) made a lot of people happy. It opened up a lot of people’s minds as to what could happen. For example: You don’t have to have a wall that is solid, you can have a wall with a hole in it. That helped me go to bed in our room without Mary. By doing the big round window and looking out it became a different kind of ambiance. And the blues and whites that were good with us (John and his wife Mary), they’re gone. It’s a form of adjusting. You can help people — it’s like a child dies. You want to get rid of the room right away. So you might take out the whole wall and build it into a library and make it into a space that people can enjoy and it doesn’t relate to the love that lived there. It’s wonderful what you can do. And I attribute that in great part to just fabulous teachers. I mean Ed Rossbach.

MN: You mentioned him in your book.

JW: He said to me one day, [in front of] everybody in class, “You did a better job than they did, but you didn’t do anything today that you haven’t done before.  Would you approach the project again, and try to be three years of age.” You know, beautiful!

I had the privilege in New York to see an exhibition of his baskets a few years back.  The romance of them, the structure of them! I think Jack Lenor Larsen arranged it — they were very good friends.  I mean, who’s going to tell you something like that?  A good teacher.

(The conversation turned towards working with Tommy Church, and his 40-year project working on the Fagan Estate in Hillsborough).

JW: Oh, my first big piece, I have it, I have it, I have it for you. I sat next to a gentleman at a fashion show, a furniture fashion show, “Live as well as you look.” – conducted by my employer.  I was brand new on the job.

MN: Was that at Macy’s?

JW: No, it was at the Jackson Furniture Company; and it was a fabulous store, I mean outstanding. I was all involved with Moholy-Nagy, and Vision and Motion (1947 book on modern design) — I was a student and I couldn’t control myself. And he (the gentleman) found out that I had just been employed. So he said, “Young man, I would like you to come to my house.”  I didn’t know that he was the owner; it was his son that hired me. At any rate, he said, “I’ve lived in the country all along, and I’ve enjoyed it, and now I’m living on the seventeenth floor of this bloody building overlooking Lake Merritt.” And, he said, “I came in, and I had a bowel movement, and there wasn’t any toilet tissue. I had to go all the way down in the basement and bring up some toilet tissue from our store room.  And then I thought, ‘Oh God, I’d like a scotch.’  And there wasn’t any scotch. So I got in the elevator and I went down and I brought up a bottle of  scotch, and I sat down at the table in the dining room, poured myself a drink, and said, ‘I really hate that radiator.’ I would like you to design a cabinet for me that covers the radiator, has toilet tissue on one side and scotch on the other.” Isn’t that fabulous?

MN: Yes! So then you got to design that?

JW: I did, and I did his house.

MN: The whole flat?

JW: Yes, working primarily with things that he had, except that I put in a T.H. Robsjohn Gibbings table that was big and beautiful, and he was prone to drinking into the night hours, and he came in, and he didn’t know it was there, it was black, and he really hurt himself.

MN: The funny things you think about when you’re doing design.

JW: The thing that I enjoyed I think perhaps more than anything else is that we were able to work with so many crafts people. I can be in any space in this house and say I designed that book rack, or I designed that piece, or I designed that piece, what have you.

John Wheatman’s garden at his home. Photography by David Wakely

John wanted to leave us with two quotations:

“He who loves an old house will never love in vain. For how can any old house used to sun and rain, to lilac, and to larkspur, and arching trees above, fail to give its answer to the heart that gives its love?”

That, from a sundial in Nantucket, and then this:

“Unless it’s a ‘party plan,’ you should always buy and plan for the future and allow for changes in light, space, and forms unending.”

That, from Mr. Wheatman himself.

Mr. Wheatman lives in San Francisco, and is listed in the phone book.