Decorating like it's San Francisco

Bringing the best of the City by the Bay into your home

Last week I had the pleasure of driving across the Golden Gate Bridge. I’ve made this trip many, many times over my lifetime but it never ceases to get my heart racing.

The living room in A.J. Johari’s San Francisco row house. Johari collects unique light fixtures, artwork, and textiles. (Photo: A.J. Johari)

But I’ve never crossed it with a large car monitor showing me the sweeping cables and dizzying heights of each gate in bright 3D color as I drove by. It was most distracting and I felt like a kid on a carnival ride.

San Francisco is an extraordinary place. Filled with history of California’s earliest days and now thriving as one of the preeminent tech centers of the world. Grappling with inequality and unhoused people while still enthralling millions of visitors with its Victorian row houses, wedding-cake Italianate mansions and picturesque waterfronts.

There is nothing else like it.

Gump’s, San Francisco’s oldest department store founded in 1861, offers exclusive items like this botanical garden chair that captures the city’s strong Asian influence. (Photo: Gump’s)

It’s a place with tremendous potential, recognized by its shapes and color, wildly divergent histories and lifestyles. We hear a lot about San Francisco’s spectacularly boring fashion, dominated by colorless, minimalist clothing preferred by tech professionals. So we look elsewhere, to architectural detail and color, to ethnic influence and natural curiosities. Its bridges and sharp-toothed skyline. A gilded opera house and brilliant-hued Chinatown.

Johari’s quintessential San Francisco bedroom, with warm orange accents and fog-shrouded scenery. (Photo: A.J. Johari)

After tearing my eyes away from the Golden Gate virtual odyssey playing on my screen, I began to think about the many ways San Francisco shows its colors, and quirks, and how they could be effectively translated into room design.

The Golden Gate’s hue

It’s not really golden; more of a burnt orange. The Golden Gate is painted over and over again with a custom mix called Golden Gate International Orange, chosen after considering gray (and black!) by bridge architect Irving Morrow in 1935. It’s pretty bright, intended to be very obvious for ships and such to avoid when the fog rolls in. But it also glows in glorious tandem with the Marin headlands and the city skyline at sunset.

Wall art made from original 1935 handrails of the Golden Gate Bridge that were removed in the 1990s for necessary repairs. (Photo: Golden Gate Furniture)

A small artisanal company was able to acquire much of the steel handrails when the bridge was repaired in 1993. Owner Richard Bulan created a headboard for himself and then made a few more. He now offers an array of handcut decorative items that bring a little bit of San Francisco into a home.

Den with a bay view in Pacific Heights (Photo: Laura Larkin Interiors)

Even without pieces of the bridge, you can have a lot of fun playing with a very bright and vibrant orange to spice up any room. From art to upholstery, pillows to paint, the color of the Golden Gate bridge will warm you even on the coldest of days. I think orange is having a moment in interior design, so why not make it an homage to International Orange?

A city on many hills

San Francisco rests on 50 named hills, including Telegraph Hill, Russian Hill, and Nob Hill. The highest one, Mount Davidson, is more than 900 feet high. The result is a vertiginous series of inclines and declines that astound the senses (and require nerves of steel when driving). There is nothing flat or monotonous in San Francisco.

Curvatures in the sconce and the wall-mounted sink call to mind San Francisco’s hilly topography. (Photo: DecorPad)

The narrow row houses rest easily on their sloping streets, false fronts outlined with contrasting paint palettes and pointing towards a wind-freshened blue sky. San Francisco is a vertical city in every sense, encouraging a sense of climbing and reaching for something better.

Fog banks

Dramatic fog banks march over the Golden Gate Bridge and cover parts of the city so that you need a puffer coat in one neighborhood and a pair of shorts in another.

People love it, people hate it, but fog is a defining feature of the city that lends incredible beauty to its natural landscape.

Textile designer Kelly Ventura created this “fig in fog” fabric that beautifully captures the cool and smoky look of San Francisco on a foggy afternoon. (Photo: Kelly Ventura)

San Francisco fog is not always gray; it’s lilac at birth, and turns silver when the sun shines through. I’m cautious about using a lot of gray in interiors, especially flooring. But used well, it can be astonishingly beautiful. Choose wisely and use your imagination when combining this ethereal shade with other elements in a room.

This chest has both modern lines and a moody fog color to complement an eclectic room design. (Photo: Grayson Living)

There are a lot of cities that provide exciting inspiration for room design. Some of them are obvious and others need a little time (and your full attention) to divulge their decorative secrets. Next time you are traveling to your favorite, or a new-to-you city, open up your eyes to some ways to bring it home with you.