California Home and Design

This year's San Francisco Decorator Showcase featured 30 of the city's leading designers, who each transformed one room in a 1905 Pacific Heights mansion. Here, three veteran showcase designers offer an insider's perspective.

BY MIKHAEL ROMAIN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVID DUNCAN LIVINGSTON

"I wanted the room to have a library feel," says Geoffrey De Sousa. "It's a place where you could sit on a sofa and read a book—somewhere that you would want to stay for a long time."

When designing the showcase house's living room, Geoffrey De Sousa of De Sousa Hughes set out to exhibit the ultimate in understated luxury. With a showroom-owner's eye for display, De Sousa combined custom furniture, couture textiles and one-of-a-kind art pieces. "I love individual pieces for what they are, but it's the mix that makes a room interesting," says De Sousa. "Choosing great elements—even if they're from different eras—will ensure that it's all going to work together."

The 26-by-42-foot living room has abundant natural lighting, which allowed De Sousa to choose a palette and furniture arrangement that might not have worked in a smaller, darker room. He covered the walls in midnight-blue silk and chose rust as an accent color on the furniture and draperies. De Sousa divided the room into two separate seating areas, with a hammered-metal Parsons table by Stephanie Odegard as the room's centerpiece. In one seating area, a cognac-colored suede sofa faces a pair of turn-of-the-century black leather chairs and is flanked by two Jean-Michel Frank chairs upholstered in Judy Ross embroidered textiles. Across the room, the other seating area is anchored by a Jean de Merry painting of horses that is composed of 36 hand-painted glass squares. De Sousa's favorite element is the custom draperies from Holland & Sherry; appliquéd and embroidered, they create a striking frame for the city views.

"I made sure to pull a color that had gray with enough warmth to suit those cloudy San Francisco days," says Coddington. "This blue really changes depending on the lighting." A modern floral pattern reoccurs throughout the space—on the rugs, upholstery and pillows.

Out the window was the first place that Melanie Coddington looked when she walked into the sitting room that she was about to overhaul. Though the room was gutted and the windows were partially boarded, glimpses of the remarkable Bay views could be seen. "I really responded to the blues I saw in the sky and sea outside," she says.

Though the San Francisco designer often creates custom furniture pieces for her clients, Coddington chose to outfit this space with vintage finds from flea markets and online auction houses and focus her real efforts on the upholstery and furniture details. "There are a lot of distinctive features in each upholstered piece—everything from the fabric to the nail-head detailing and the welting is custom. Part of luxury design is paying attention to the details," she says. Choosing a vibrant blue-and-gold floral fabric for the pair of wing chairs that are front and center, she picked up the same fabric for the accent pillows, which she had piped in gold lamé. "I spent way more than I should have on some of the fabric, but it's really fun and modern and a little unexpected in a room like this," says Coddington.

Curves and floral motifs repeat throughout the space, playing off the ornate marble fireplace and offering a distinctly feminine look. The graceful legs on a 1980s desk are echoed in a spiral nail-head detail on the accompanying wing chair and in the arched floor lamp. "Repeating shapes and colors calm the eye and make everything come together," she says.

(Left) In the northwest corner of the deck, Weatherill painted the walls hot pink and created a seating area accented with green pillows. The same green reappears on the cushions in another seating area (middle). The pink pops up again on a wall by the elevator entrance (right).

Arriving on the roof deck of what was formerly a boarding house, one can't help but be taken aback by the panoramic views of the city, the Bay and beyond. Multi-talented designer Sean Weatherill was faced with the challenge of complementing this remarkable vantage point in his design of the 2,000-square-foot rooftop space. "I knew I couldn't compete with the view. So I chose a vibrant color, which would really bring people back to the space at hand," says Weatherill, who teamed up with Restoration Hardware to furnish three distinct seating areas on the roof.

Two shocking-pink walls draw attention to the surrounding living space, which is divided into a secluded lounge area, a garden, and a gallery of statues—all connected by teak decking, stone pavers and containers filled with grasses that, in total, make this Pacific Heights aerie feel surprisingly grounded.

Weatherill describes his personal aesthetic as edgy, and he often creates bold, modern furniture for his landscape design company's projects, so using the relatively traditional collections from Restoration Hardware meant finding new ways to make the space stand out. He found his answer in an artist friend: Weatherill contacted Tucson-based sculptor Curt Brill for the large cast-bronze, stylized female figures. "It's easy to make a rooftop garden that is soothing. The nice thing about this space is that it's soothing on one side, and on the other it's more of a party scene," says Weatherill.