Like a person, a house goes through phases. Take the nearly 8,000-square-foot home in Hillsborough, California. It began life as a bare new build: just clean lines and wide views of the San Francisco Bay skyline, with Mount Diablo in the distance. The house was “basically a white box,” says the homeowner’s own creative director, Jenni Witt.
To bring warmth and character to the space, Witt and the homeowner tapped Los Angeles–based designer Luke Foss. The job, explained Witt, needed someone nimble. The homeowner wanted to be part of the process too. He was already living in the house. He had two kids—a teen and a preteen—and had chosen the home because it was close to their schools. Therefore, the work would need to happen in phases. Foss’s job would require swooping in during the summer, when the homeowner and kids were away, to transform the place room by room. “Because the client was used to creating things iteratively in his own career, he asked us to take a similar approach,” says Witt. “He did not mind living in a work-in-progress, because he understood it would get better and better over time.”
To start, says Foss, they “created a hierarchy,” evaluating which areas were most important to begin with: “We did his primary and the living room spaces downstairs first. That was one summer. Then the next summer we did the upper living room, a kitchen, and his office. And the last summer was the accessories and bathrooms. It was ongoing, but the big pushes were always in the summer.”
The house itself represented a phase too. The homeowner was newly single, and he needed spaces to entertain and explore an interest in music and art, as well as a place that was comfortable for the kids. He wanted everything analog, and he wanted the flow and function of the house optimized. Working closely with Witt, the client, art consultant Nicolás Colón (founder of the contemporary art gallery in San Francisco called Climate Control), and contractors from Pete Moffatt Construction, the team leaned into a “loose, comfortable, casual” aesthetic, says Foss. Think Northern California: “Nothing too formal—always somewhere where people could sit on the floor or pull up a floor pillow and cram next to someone and have a conversation.”
In the entry, rough-edge bluestone tile flooring supports the first of many curated conversations between evocative art, organic shapes, and expressive forms. An elegant George Nakashima table in walnut and rosewood (that looks as though it’s balanced impossibly on a single leg) holds a polka-dot ceramic vessel by Addison Woolsey. From a cement pedestal, the eight-foot limb of a schefflera bonsai reaches across the table. What had once been an oversized pit of rocks, says Witt, was transformed by Luke into this “beautifully asymmetrical composition.”
In the living room, a modular chocolate-brown suede sofa from Living Divani, by Piero Lissoni, sets the tone. Pulled together, it’s perfect for quiet conversations. Pushed to the sides of the room, there’s plenty of space to dance on the gold mohair rug. Above, a giant vintage Noguchi lamp is fitted with a bulb that changes colors. “It’s a way of having party lights without it feeling, you know, too on the nose,” says Foss. The idea being that the space can go “from day to night and still feel tasteful.”
One of Foss’s favorite moments is the staircase, which, fittingly, came together in stages—and a series of creative adjustments. “Luke and I noticed that the light felt cool and green on the lower floor, then opened up to a warm golden sky on the upper floor,” says Witt. “We imagined the journey up the stairwell from the lower level to the upper could feel like climbing from a forest floor up to the tops of the trees.” The original railing, all glass (“that always feels like a mall to me,” says Foss), was removed and replaced by a custom aluminum rail. Only it didn’t let light through, so Foss thought of cutouts at spaced intervals and commissioned John Hogan to make glass inserts. “We spent an entire day composing which panel went where,” says Witt, “checking the light as the sun passed over the house to capture the mood change as you traverse up the stairs.” The result looks “like little melted pieces of candy,” says Foss.
It’s the art, and a handful of standout vintage pieces, that really make the house a home. “It was important for me that the artwork in the home reflected the wisdom of a life well lived,” says Colón. “A home especially should feel like a unique reflection of a client’s personal style created over time.” Find it in the geometry of Shannon Rogers’s Myriad (2023). And the photonegative on stainless steel in Robert Rauschenberg’s Seminole Host / ROCI USA (Wax Fire Works) (1990; Edition 3/22). “I come from the furniture world,” says Foss, “so that’s always the most exciting part to me, sourcing the furniture.” Like a bright orange Flos Snoopy table lamp by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni and a space-age vintage armchair by Ettore Sottsass; pieces with provenance and elevated craftsmanship that imbue a space with meaning. “If you’re not in this world, and you don’t know all these pieces by heart, you might not totally see it initially,” says Foss. But you feel it. “You can tell it’s well designed. There’s a history, there’s a beauty, there’s a soul.”