An interior designer’s San Francisco house with a warm and welcoming palette

In the US, the practice of house buyers wooing sellers with heartfelt letters and touching videos is fairly common. So interior designer Lauren Weiss is quite happy to admit that she and her husband Eli begged the then owners of this terraced house in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow neighbourhood to sell to them when it had come onto the market. ‘I basically sent them a love letter with a picture of our daughters,’ she recalls, laughing. Luckily, the heartstrings approach worked and the couple and their two young girls moved into the house in 2016.

Lauren, who grew up in Los Angeles, moved to San Francisco just over 20 years ago after university. ‘I had no idea that I would end up putting down roots here, but it felt like a city with a good balance,’ she says. For years, Lauren and Eli had been renting apartments in Cow Hollow – so-called because cattle used to graze on the land – a desirable neighbourhood not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. However, with the arrival of their two daughters (who are now aged nine and 11), they were running out of space.

In the family room, the mid-century Arne Norell sofa sourced from Jasper Maison in Paris and the cluster of contemporary side tables by Brooklyn design studio Fort Standard pick up on the striped rug. An ‘MC’ armchair from Hollywood at Home by Peter Dunham, upholstered in a patterned print from Bennison Fabrics, is teamed with a lamp from local vintage emporium Stuff and a side table found by Lauren’s parents-in-law in a Moroccan souk while on their honeymoon in the Sixties. Panelling painted in Benjamin Moore’s ‘White Dove’ provides the perfect foil for an eye-catching abstract painting – another Stuff find.

Sam Frost

‘When we started looking for houses, I realised that I was wedded to about three streets around where we were living,’ Lauren explains. This house, built in 1911 and just a block down from where the couple had been renting, immediately appealed. Unlike almost all the properties they had viewed, the three-storey terrace had not been overhauled by developers. What is more, the changes that had been made during a previous renovation in 1999 were thoughtful and to Lauren’s taste. These included the addition of a huge floor-to-ceiling steel-framed window in the kitchen. ‘It felt like the kind of feature you’d find in a brownstone in New York and was so timeless,’ she says.

The layout worked well and has remained the same. On the raised ground floor, an entrance hall leads to a formal sitting room at the front of the house, with the kitchen, dining room and orangery-like family room (complete with the original wavy-glass windows) at the south-facing rear. Three bedrooms, one of which has an en-suite bathroom, unfold across the first floor, while there is a spare room, Lauren’s home studio and a bathroom-cum-laundry room in the attic.

With such good bones to work with, Lauren – who set up on her own as an interior designer in 2012 after working with a local design firm – was itching to make a few tweaks. Although the initial plan was simply to overhaul the main bedroom’s en-suite bathroom, the renovations quickly grew beyond craning in slabs of marble and led to the entire house being rewired.

An Isamu Noguchi pendant provides a distinctive focal point above the Pierre Jeanneret-inspired table and Niels Otto Møller ‘Model 78’ rosewood chairs.

Sam Frost