This is The Looker, a column about design and style from San Francisco Standard editor-at-large Erin Feher.
When Paul Thomson settles into his home office in Dolores Heights, he sometimes feels suspended between two worlds. The picture window frames a postcard-perfect view of the San Francisco skyline, while the walls around him — striated shades of sandy brown printed on textured grasscloth — recall the Chalbi Desert in Kenya, where the wildlife conservationist has spent countless unspoiled nights.
The director of conservation programs at Wildlife Conservation Network, Thompson has spent much of his adult life living in remote places and protecting animals: lions, hyenas and leopards, as well as pangolins — “my favorite little underdog in the animal kingdom.”
Thomson’s family moved to the Bay Area from New Zealand when he was 5, and he grew up mainly in the South Bay, his spare time spent “playing in the dirt” in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the foothills of the Sierras. His parents were nature lovers who encouraged a passion for the outdoors, but it was during his first visit to Africa, in his teens, that his focus sharpened.
He went on to study wildlife ecology in college, obtaining a master’s in conservation at Yale, and after graduating embarked on a brutal, yearlong unpaid internship that required living in a tent in Nairobi. He eventually landed his dream job as a partner in a lion conservation group in Kenya, trying to “help local people in Northern Kenya find ways to live alongside these big toothsome carnivores.”
But after a few years, he found himself conflicted. “I knew I could not be my full self,” recalls Thomson. “I could not be an openly gay man safely in Northern Kenya.”
His colorful, personality-packed home near the top of Cumberland Street is a living totem to the eventful life he has led ever since — and to the future he dreamed for himself.
Thomson moved to San Francisco in 2013 and took a job with the Silicon Valley-based Wildlife Conservation Network, which supports those around the world working to protect endangered wildlife.
He spent almost a year exploring the city’s real estate wilderness before stepping through the door of the Dolores Heights property. The first thing he saw was a small nook outfitted with a bay window. The three walls of glass framed a view of the San Francisco skyline that took his breath away. He knew this was the house. He wrote an offer that included his personal story, and the house was his.
After living there as it was for about a year, he asked a friend, the interior designer Kevin Sawyers, to help him pick out some furnishings and bat around design ideas. Sawyers insisted that Thomson get serious: interview other designers, think bigger and call him again if he still wanted to team up. Eventually, Thomson called, and the project began in earnest. Sawyers is known for his bold moves; bright colors, mixed patterns and unexpected textures are just a few of his signatures.
“I think traditionally; I’ve always wanted to play it a bit safe,” says Thomson. “So I love that he pushes me. I had to develop a little bit of trust and willingness to just hand over the reins to him.”
“Almost all clients have this moment where they figure out that they can trust you,” says Sawyers. Thomson’s trust-fall moment was a green-striped velvet chair in the living room. “Even after it was installed, he kept saying, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ Then, one day, his landscaper was walking through the house, and she stopped dead in her tracks and said, ‘Oh, my god, I love that green-striped chair.’ All it took was for someone else, a design-oriented person, to praise it. And then everything clicked in, and he was sold.”
The first phase of the renovation tackled the top two floors. The primary bedroom at the top went from stark white to inky blue, adding drama to the vaulted ceilings. The deep eaves of the former attic were an opportunity to play with angles and optimize space, from the custom headboard with triangular cutouts for storage to the spa-like shower, tiled in blue-black and featuring a bench in a geometry that mirrors the deeply sloping ceiling.
On the main floor, views were optimized at every turn, from a breakfast banquet that looks onto the verdant backyard to Thomson’s beloved corner just inside the front door, that first-impression view of the San Francisco skyline that won him over. Sawyer designed a three-sided window seat where Thomson regularly enjoys his morning coffee.
The basement level was the most recent project. It transformed the dark and cramped floor into a well-appointed guest suite with undeniably sexy vibes and a well-stocked wet bar. Sawyers really let loose with color and pattern in this secluded sanctuary, using wood veneer wallpaper from Élitis, Golden Gate Bridge-inspired International Orange paint on the cabinets and media center and a riot of rich patterns in the bedroom.
Thomson praised the designer for “pushing the boundaries with colors and patterns, but in a way that doesn’t insert too much Kevin into it, because this is my home. You look around, and there’s still a lot of eclectic stuff that kind of speaks to places I’ve been and traveled to or that have influenced me. I love it.”
However, Thomson never envisioned this house being about only him. He recalls many nights feeling alone in Kenya and realizing that he wanted more. “I got to this crossroads where I was like, I’m either going to be chasing lions around and living in a tent in the middle of nowhere, or I’m going to develop my own life, maybe find a husband, have a family and be closer to my family back here.”
“I had a little bit of that, ‘If you build it, he will come’ fantasy,” he adds. “I’m going to get this house, and I’m going to create this life that I want, and maybe that will attract the family or social life that I’ve been dreaming about.”
Ironically, it was while he was living in a rental during the most recent renovations that he spotted the man who would figure prominently into his future: Aaron Andrade, an ER doctor at Novato Community Hospital.
“It was the classic SF gay love story; we actually met in the gym,” Thomson says, laughing. Both were dating other people at the time, so they orbited each other until reuniting in early 2021 in the dog food aisle at Pet Food Express in the Castro, each with pandemic puppies in tow.
They set up a date in the dog park. They’ve been inseparable since. Once the renovations wrapped in June, Thomson asked Andrade and his dogs, Felicia and Duncan, to move into the finally completed house with him and his own pup, Timber. “Now we’re like a ‘Brady Bunch’ family,” he said.
Just a few weeks ago, Thomson returned from a work trip to Vietnam and China — part of a project he spearheaded to reduce the poaching and trafficking of his beloved pangolins — and spotted a 75-degree day coming up in the forecast. He called off work, made a secret little picnic with a bottle of champagne and loaded everybody into the car.
They drove out to Limantour Beach in Point Reyes, and, after setting up in the sand, Thomson pulled out the pair of matching rings he’d been nervously patting in his pocket all morning. Andrade said yes.
Thomson says making the decision to leave Kenya was one of the hardest in his life. But he has never doubted he made the right choice. “I knew I wanted to go and see other parts of the world and really explore what else is out there, but I always knew that San Francisco would be the place that I would end up,” he says. “Even when San Francisco really gets on my nerves and I fantasize about going somewhere else, I know there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”