When most people renovate a house, they want it done yesterday. The homeowners of this San Francisco home took the opposite approach. Over 11 years, they worked room by room with designer Lynn Kloythanomsup of Landed Interiors to restore a 1916 house in the Richmond District near Golden Gate Park. The result is a home that feels completely disconnected from trends — designed as much for the couple as for their show corgis.
The homeowners, both physicians, moved from New York City to this historic house after a cross-country relocation. The structure still had its original coved ceilings, millwork, and a dining hutch. But years of awkward updates had stripped away much of the character. “In some ways, it felt like we were living in a rental,” the wife recalls. “The overall mood of the house didn’t feel like us.” Upstairs bedroom doors still had deadbolts, a sign the house may have once been split into multiple units.
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The wife found Kloythanomsup through a 2015 Domino magazine spread of the designer’s own apartment. She called after seeing that issue. Most interiors she found online at the time felt too polished, too impersonal. “I had finally found what I was looking for,” she says. The team also included architect Susanna Douglas and contractor Ben Hardy & Company.
Instead of gutting the whole house at once, furnishings came first. A bathroom renovation happened several years later. Many of the most important updates are nearly invisible: restoring original wooden windows, repairing chipped moldings, skim-coating cracked plaster walls. “It’s a lot of stuff that you don’t really see,” the designer says. “But once it’s restored, it just feels more sound.”
Living in the house changed what they wanted
That slow pace shaped the interiors in ways a quick renovation would not have. “It allowed us time to live in the house, which helped us know what we needed,” the wife says. “We had grown and changed personally over the many years of our project, which allowed us time to think more about what we wanted.” The couple didn’t decorate from scratch. Instead, they combined walnut furniture from their New York apartment with vintage pieces, work from emerging artists, and smaller finds that carry personal meaning rather than purely decorative value.
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Even the less glamorous parts of daily life got careful attention. The homeowners ordered 10 linen sheet samples to compare colors and textures before picking bedding. The dog-bathing routine also shaped decisions. Upstairs, the bathroom renovation included a hand shower specifically to rinse the corgis. The designers chose durable surfaces and finishes to handle muddy paws and post-bath shake-offs. But the room doesn’t feel like a utility space. It started with a sunny yellow Room & Board vanity that Kloythanomsup found, which led to color-matched paneling throughout. Green field tile in the shower, checkerboard floors, and storage hidden behind a jib door keep the room from drifting into purely “dog bath” territory.
Quiet details that don’t shout
Other rooms are less obvious but still hold surprises. In the living room, the fireplace is lined with antique Dutch Delft tiles — not the usual blue, but oxblood and brown tones, each hand-selected for its animal motif. The husband’s office, painted a moody gray-blue, doubles as a guest room with a custom daybed: two stacked twin mattresses that can be separated when their niece and nephew visit. In the primary bedroom, Kloythanomsup paired olive walls with a pale blue ceiling, inspired by the pastel porch ceilings of the American South. “I can imagine them resting really well in that space,” she says.
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For the wife, the living room remains the emotional center. “I spend most of my time at home here,” she says. “There is so much beautiful light, artwork, and a collection of objects and books that we’ve carried with us throughout our lives.” Nothing about the house feels rushed — not the restoration work, not the collecting, not even the decision on bed linens. The show corgis seem to approve, though they don’t have a say in the design process.
The project, spanning more than a decade, stands in contrast to the kind of instant makeovers that dominate social media. It’s a reminder that good design sometimes just takes time — and that living in a space is the best way to figure out what it actually needs.
