San Francisco Decorator Showcase House 2014
The 9000 sq.ft. home surrounded by views of the Pacific and the Presidio.
The Rocky Point team took a quick trip to San Francisco this weekend. San Francisco is such a vibrant city bubbling with creativity and character. When you match its modern virtuosity with the city's rich history, you can find some truly inspiring work. One of the main reasons for our trip was to check out the $18 million, 9000 sq.ft., Decorator Showcase House; an annual event where an historic mansion is opened to a collection of the Bay Area's best designers, decorators and landscapers to bid on the rooms they want to sink their creative "teeth" into.
Every room is decorated by a different team.
To give you a better idea of what happens behind the scenes, one of the designers wrote this on her blog: "In this San Francisco Decorator Showcase, the designers bid on two rooms and the committee chooses their favorite. Just being invited to tour the showcase house is an honor but to design a room means you are mingling amongst the creative elite. And the competition is fierce! We’re talking America’s Top Model kinda fierce. So when the design committee asked me to take on a large guest suite, I took a deep breath, begged forgiveness from my clients, and got it done!" (Girly Modern Blog - Behind the Scenes with Melanie)
The house is then available for viewing and ticket sale proceeds go to the San Francisco University High School financial aid program. Apparently, this particular home found an owner before the public even had access to it this year.
From a builder's perspective, there were a lot of things that caught our eye that were not included in the tour guidebook or designer summaries. (We will write an entirely different post soon, talking about the creative ways to embrace the "imperfections" that can be found in the historical homes of San Francisco).
In this particular home we wanted to share this stunning, 100 year old, 3-story staircase. Notice how each step is painstakingly crafted to give the illusion that they are stacked on top of each other without posts or walls to support it? That takes some serious time, money and talent nowadays, but it's pretty spectacular. While Indonesian-born designer, Jonathan Rachman chose the decor, artwork and paint colours to compliment the original architecture, we aren't sure who masterfully created those "hovering" steps back in the early 1900s. This is why we love attending events like these as often as possible. We bring these ideas back to our clients and are inspired to break free from what everyone else here is doing. We build "outside of the box" so to speak.
The 100-year old, "hovering" 3-story staircase.