This is The Looker, a column about design and style from San Francisco Standard editor-at-large Erin Feher.
There’s a slick-winged scarab on the floor of Marie McCarthy’s Outer Sunset house. It’s easy to miss, but once your eyes have caught it, you’ll soon realize the floor is crawling with a swarm of small specimens.
Painted matte black and pockmarked with dents and holes from ancient wood knots, the floor is filled with gilded insects or flecks of gold leaf trapped in a clear epoxy — imperfections remade into inspiration.
This is the kind of detail for which McCarthy, a jeweler and owner of Fiat Lux and Rose Gold’s Tattoo & Piercing, is known: exquisite baubles with eerie undertones. Inside a home that is glinting with eye-catching art and walls swirling and splattered with color, it’s the quieter design moments that leave the loudest impressions. Skulls, menacing masks, gothic religious iconography, and even framed bits of teeth, hair, and rope are displayed throughout, acting as subtle companions to custom murals by Mission School artist and friend Victor Reyes.
The combinations are both bewitching and playful. In the corner of the living room is a hanging leather chair framed in a blackened steel hoop. “This is my favorite room, but when kids come over for sleepovers, I’m like, maybe this swing chair was not a good idea,” says McCarthy.
One look at McCarthy makes it clear that her home is an unmediated expression of her personal style. Curled up on the sofa of the living room, she tucks her blood-red-painted toes under her silky, tiger-embossed pajama set. Her ears, neck, and fingers are adorned with stacked and layered jewelry, tattoos covering her exposed hands and chest, the yellow-gold handle of a dagger inching up the center of her throat.
McCarthy and her husband, Alexei Angelides, a mathematical logician, philosopher, and former professor who teaches math at Riordan High School, bought the house at the end of 2020. After 20-plus years of renting, mostly in the Lower Haight, Mission, and Castro, the couple and their school-age son, Anaximander, were pushed by the pandemic into new territory.
“At first we were looking for apartments to rent out here,” says McCarthy, who was simultaneously building out the Fillmore location of Fiat Lux, which would bring her to three brick-and-mortar shops in the city. “And then I thought, what am I doing? I’m doing so well in business, I need to get my personal life on track, too.”
The Outer Sunset location was ideal for the couple — Angelides loves the ocean, McCarthy loves the hot cider at Outerlands — but the house was in need of an overhaul. Built in 1938, it was an unassuming Outer Avenues clone painted gentrification gray and backed by a desolate slab of fenced-in concrete. McCarthy and Angelides, both skilled jewelry makers, were confident in their DIY prowess and figured the home’s design issues could be rectified with a few trips to the hardware store.
“My philosophy is, what can we do with a can of paint?” says McCarthy, whose first priority was to banish the butter-yellow walls throughout the house.
“I didn’t know that yellow was so psychotically triggering for me until we moved in,” she recalls. “Alexei came home one day, and I was furiously painting the whole thing white. I was like, ‘I cannot live like this.’”
Other quirks included a single bathroom outfitted with two showers, one so tiny McCarthy couldn’t shave her legs; 3-foot mini-closets tacked onto the two bedrooms; and an illegal ground-floor unit with no outdoor access, outfitted with a sketchy hot plate.
Eventually, McCarthy and Angelides needed professional help, so they called their friends Megan McGuinn and Brandt Hewitt of the San Francisco design studio Medium Small. McGuinn suggested tweaks to the floor plan, such as eliminating the original bedroom closet to give the neighboring bathroom more space and moving the kitchen from the top floor to the garage level. McCarthy was initially intimidated by the idea of a capital-R renovation, insisting that they live in the house the entire time. But she admits that the big, messy moves were worth it.
The result is a house that maintains its early 20th century spirit — with the original moldings, arched doorways, and carved fireplace surround — but is all suited up in modern luxe-punk splendor. The moldings and fireplace are painted black with gold detailing, and the arched doors and cutouts open into rooms blasted with the color and pattern of Reyes’ abstract murals. The artist also reimagined the exterior of the house, which is painted in atmospheric blues and grays.
The new bathroom is wrapped, floor to ceiling, in petite white hexagonal tile, and the spacious walk-in shower is defined by a simple pane of black-framed glass. A slender black pipe hangs from the ceiling, opening into an ovoid sink set on a wood-and-steel vanity — an ingenious custom design inspired by the plumbing aisle of their local hardware store. McCarthy and Angelides found the sink on the display floor of a local shop and hired a plumber to craft the unique faucet out of off-the-shelf pipe.
On the ground floor, the new kitchen and sitting room echo the beach just blocks away, with a Reyes mural in sunset shades of pink, ochre, and blue and a pair of multi-tiered Terrazza sofas in sandy tan leather and off-white boucle. A support beam is meticulously wrapped in white nautical rope — a particularly meditative DIY project for McCarthy — and echoes the looping, thick, white cords of the buoy-like pendants slung over the kitchen island. The glow of the sitting area transitions to the deeper blue of the kitchen, demarcated by a row of powder-pink bar stools. Concrete tiles hand-painted with navy waves are intentionally laid so the patterns don’t match up; McCarthy is drawn to imperfection and a tenuous asymmetry, a theme that recurs in her jewelry designs.
She opened her first jewelry shop in 2007, on the touristy stretch of the Haight. She had been working at an art gallery and had launched a side hustle of selling smaller artist-made objects to corporations for executive gifts and board meetings. Her landlord watched McCarthy diligently hauling a vintage salesgirl suitcase around town and offered to go into business with her, renting her a commercial space at a deep discount. She’s been in business for herself ever since, learning jewelry-making along the way, expanding into tattooing and piercing, and developing a cult following of edgy, bling-loving clients who would feel woefully out of place at Tiffany’s.
“The thing that I love about San Francisco is that people are so open-minded — not just about fashion or sexual preferences, but if you have an idea and dedication and you’re committed, someone will help you. It’s a melting pot for ideas, and people can do really wild things here that you can’t do anywhere else,” says McCarthy, who arrived from St. Louis in 2001. “If I would have been born in San Francisco, I probably would have saved 20 years of trying to figure out who I was or where I was going.”
