Art at the Heart
An art-loving couple’s hilltop home is
dramatically refashioned to showcase their treasured collection
Jim and Joy Karol built their Lafayette home years before they
began to collect art. At the time, their primary goal was merely
to create large, interconnected rooms with windows that took
full advantage of Mother Nature’s artwork.
“Fifteen years ago, when we built the home, we were all
about openness,” says Joy Karol. “The views were
high up in the treetops, and we wanted to capture them with large
windows and a spacious, flowing floor plan.”
Over time, Joy became interested in modern art. Stints as a
docent at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art and art appreciation
classes through the University of California, Berkeley Extension,
transformed her into a savvy art collector. Looking for affordable
art, Joy became familiar with the work of young artists emerging
from Vietnam.
“I love the openness and some of the edginess that’s
coming out of this burgeoning art community,” she says. “It
has been fun to get in on the ground floor.”
After acquiring several pieces on a trip to Vietnam, she
decided it was time to hire an interior designer who would
be able to help the couple properly showcase the art in
their home. While researching online, she came across the
San Francisco firm of Applegate Tran Interiors and noticed
that partner Gioi Tran was himself a Vietnamese artist.
She liked the look of the firm’s
work and thought it might be the perfect fit for the project.
“Initially, this was a very daunting house,” recalls
Vernon Applegate, Tran’s partner in the firm, who worked
with designer Meghan Nohr on the project. “There were so
many angles to the rooms and different openings with lots of
curves. In order to turn it into gallery space, we really needed
to clean up the architecture.”
Applegate began by taking out a hallway niche and reworking
the dining room alcove at the end of the entryway. Then
he painted most of the public room walls white and hung
overscale lighting fixtures to lower the ceilings visually
and give the rooms a more human scale.
“The home had a huge volume of space, which would be fine
for a commercial gallery, but it felt too oversized for a residential
space,” Applegate explains. “It needed to feel more
intimate.”
The newly reworked jewel-box dining room features
faux-finished walls in a crackled slate blue with
a bronze-colored ceiling—the
handiwork of expert faux finishers Christel Heinelt and Thad
Warren. An elegant “Neblina” chandelier from Ironies
hangs over a grand, round, ebony-stained oak table from Emanuel
Morez. Curved benches custom-designed by Applegate Tran are upholstered
in Donghiaís “Heirloom” fabric.
And on the walls hang someof the earliest paintings
in the Karol collection.
Outside the alcove, two sculptures by Bay Area
sculptor Amy Evans McClure stand as sentinels.
A large horse head keeps watch at the entrance
to the dining room, and a tall winged figure is
illuminated by a central hall skylight.
In the adjacent living room, a large painting of a woman’s
face becomes the focal point for the dynamic
room design. Applegate reworked the existing fireplace and covered
it with steel-blue concrete that runs down to the hearth and then
extends to the right to create a window seat. A U-shaped steel and
rubber sculpture by Birgitta Weimer hangs on the facade.
Contemporary furniture, including a curved
white sofa from Newman Studio, sits below an
oversized fabric chandelier by Gulassa. Orange
accents in the chairs and occasional pillows
pick up the autumn colors of the maple leaves
outside the window. A round side table, inspired
by the Golden Gate Bridge and designed specifically
for this project by Applegate Tran, will debut
as part of the firm’s new furniture collection to be
called, appropriately, the Karol table.
Rather than completely renovating the kitchen,
Applegate chose to give it a fresh update by painting
the walls a sophisticated mustard yellow, adding
new window treatments and furniture, and hanging
a dramatic eggplant-colored glass light fixture
by Vitossi over the kitchen table.
“The crazy thing is that the light fixture was chosen before
we realized that outside the kitchen window, crepe myrtle blooms
in the same shade of purple,” says Joy. “The white
oleander blossoming outside Jim’s office
echoes the white chair in the room, and the
orange maple leaves reflect the living room
accents. So there were all kinds of serendipitous
connections between our initial intent to capture
the view through the architecture and the final
interior design.”
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