Transitional Italianate
This young family needed to make the most of every inch of space in their San Francisco Italianate home. Spearman Spaces remodeled the attic to create an additional 600 square feet of livable area, including a children’s bedroom with a closet, a reading nook, and a dedicated play space. We also redesigned the living and dining rooms with new layouts and furnishings. The family brought us back to complete other rooms in the home, a testament to their trust in our approach and the results we delivered.
DESIGN ELEMENTS
Italianate homes were originally designed to communicate elegance, order, and a sense of quiet drama through height, ornament, and proportion. Our work inside these spaces treats that architectural formality as a backdrop rather than a rulebook. Instead of reinforcing a single historical moment, we introduce objects and furnishings from multiple design eras — pieces that reflect different cultural references, manufacturing periods, and artistic movements — allowing the interior to feel accumulated rather than composed all at once. The tension between ornamented architecture and varied furnishings creates a sense of domestic evolution, where contemporary life sits comfortably inside historic structure. Layering material depth — warm woods, aged metals, natural stone, and textiles with subtle texture or low-contrast pattern — allows furnishings to read as part of a broader design narrative rather than as individual statement pieces.
