This is The Looker, a column about design and style from San Francisco Standard editor-at-large Erin Feher.
A walk through certain blocks of the outer avenues can feel like a case study in beige. The utilitarian “builders specials” that line the Outer Richmond seem bland and monotonous in contrast to the candy-colored Victorians and stately mansions that are San Francisco’s public architectural face.
Artist Ginevra Held grew up in one of those technicolor homes: a 1908 Edwardian flat, complete with ornate columns and cornices in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood. It had been thoughtfully updated by her architect father and eclectically furnished by her art historian mother.
But once Held and her brother went off to college, her parents decided to part with the creaky tenancy-in-common in favor of something simpler. To her parents, the freshly renovated single-family home on 40th Avenue, less than 10 blocks from the Pacific Ocean, was a solid investment. But to Held, the 1924 Mediterranean Revival the color of wet sand wasn’t just a snoozefest—it was borderline heartbreaking.
So, she took it upon herself to shake it wide awake.
| Source: Courtesy Ginevra Held
Held has spent the last five years transforming the two-bedroom house room-by-room with the arsenal of an art teacher—vats of glue, reams of fabric, stacks of sliced paper, bundles of thick-tipped Sharpie markers, and gallon after gallon of paint in a kaleidoscope of hues. The result is more gallery than house, each room an expressive experiment in taste and technique, and bursting with colors so juicy you can almost taste them.
Held is a mixed media artist who blends her own photography with everything from textiles to beach sand to bright bursts of spray paint. Held was born in Australia and spent much of her childhood traveling the world with her parents, wandering galleries and hunting down architecturally significant structures across Italy, Greece and France. Held knows how lucky she was to learn in such an immediate and immersive way, but she admits it created some challenges. “I think that’s why sometimes I got frustrated in school,” she says, “because I learned so much by just seeing things in real life.”
When she went off to UC Berkeley, Held also studied architecture, a pursuit she initially loved—until she toured an actual working architecture office and saw all the junior architects huddled in a dark room clicking away at AutoCAD. She knew from watching her father at work that building projects could take decades to go from sketch to reality, and that initial bursts of inspiration were almost always stripped away.
“It’s kind of horrifying to me,” she says. “The chasm between what you think about versus what actually happens in the end. It’s so depressing.”
When Held moved back in with her family after college, she set up an art studio on the ground floor of the house. She produced a handful of paintings on canvas, but the blank walls called to her. Held’s father had recently passed away, and her mother was splitting her time between San Francisco and Paris, so the new house was often empty and stylistically barren, its walls still painted the creamy white bought in bulk by contractors everywhere.
Held asked her mother if she was alright with her “trying some things.” Her mother nodded in encouragement, and Held quickly decamped for the paint store. First came the purple. “My poor mom,” says Held. The living room has seen the most iterations, beginning with an all-purple scheme that Held admits was something of a disaster. “Everything was wrong with the purple.”
Next came a duo-tone black-and-white look that gave Held practice in cutting lines and mastering her detail work. Held executes everything on her own, from the painting to the sewing and hanging of drapery to the meticulous application of wallpaper (her least favorite task).
| Source: Courtesy Ginevra Held
The living room’s current color scheme was inspired by a visit to the Paris showroom of Farrow & Ball, the esteemed English paint company that offers fewer than 150 shades, every one of them exquisite. “It’s like Barneys New York—somebody curated all of it. There are not 100 shades of blue. There is one and it’s the perfect one,” says Held. This is how she confidently combined blue, orange and minty green in the living room for the design that ultimately stuck—for now.
In truth, the paint colors may be the most down-to-earth thing about the living room. The showstopper is the main wall surrounding the Bay windows, papered in fluttering pages from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Beautiful and Damned.” To either side, like a curtain parting on a stage, is Fornesetti’s Procuratie e Scimmie wallpaper, which features monkeys perching amongst the pillars and arches of the famous Venetian facades in St Mark’s Square. If the house was lacking in ornamentation, Held would find a way to bring it in.
The adjoining dining room got a similar illusory treatment, the back wall plastered with trompe-l’oeil French doors from Maison Martin Margiela. Held sewed and hung floor-length white drapes on either side of the faux doors, leaving the possibility open that century-old French windows might be hiding behind them, instead of the reality of a solid, flat wall.
The hallway from the dining room and kitchen leading to the bedrooms and bath is striped like a saccharine circus tent in bright pink and white. A gilded mirror and a skateboard featuring cherubic angels reminiscent of Michelangelo only reinforces the “Fifteenth century, but make it cool” vibe that permeates the house.
Held’s own bedroom features no less than a dozen shades of aquamarine. She painted the room by hand with a brush, layering paint directly over empty picture frames nailed to the wall. The effect is of ornate moldings at first glance, but closer inspection reveals the trick. Held then decided to halt the blue about 80 percent of the way up the wall, leaving perfectly imperfect brush strokes along the top.
Held employed the same technique in the second bedroom, brushing mint green paint seemingly slipshod across (and around) the windowsills. The rusticity is a foil to the high gloss blue and orange statement wall, finished with a floor-to-ceiling graffiti piece by Held’s younger brother, Nicolas. He is also an artist, currently focused on glass blowing at Public Glass, a longstanding arts nonprofit in the Bayview.
Nicolas’s is the only other hand that has touched the home’s design. Held isn’t into collaborations, and her short stint designing for other people only clarified that for her.
“I had one client and we just worked by correspondence. She had seen my work and was totally open to it. And so it was really great,” says Held. “But then a second person came along and told me she needed help with optimizing storage. And I’m like, I am not your person.”
Immediacy and integrity are Held’s guiding principles as an artist. And for now, the place that best embodies that ethos is within these wildly colored walls on the sleepy, heavily beige edge of the city.
“This is art on my walls,” she says. “It’s my big canvas.”
