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Most renovators hope for instant gratification. These San Francisco homeowners took the opposite approach. Over the course of more than a decade—eleven years, to be exact—they worked with Lynn Kloythanomsup, founder of Landed Interiors, to restore and refine their Richmond District home room by room. In an era of deepening skepticism towards trends, the property is entirely untethered to them, designed just as thoughtfully for the couple as for their beloved show corgis.
The project began shortly after Kloythanomsup’s clients, both physicians, relocated from New York City, trading apartment life for this historic 1916 house near Golden Gate Park. The home still retained some of its original character—“coved ceilings, millwork, and dining hutch,” the wife recalls—but years of awkward updates had diluted much of its charm. “In some ways, it felt like we were living in a rental,” she says. “The overall mood of the house didn’t feel like us.” Upstairs, some of the bedroom doors even had deadbolts, hinting that the home may have once been a multifamily residence.
The wife came across Kloythanomsup’s own apartment in the pages of a 2015 Domino issue—a discovery that prompted the first phone call. At the time, most of the interiors she was finding online felt overly polished and impersonal. “I had finally found what I was looking for,” she says now. Architect Susanna Douglas and contractor Ben Hardy & Company rounded out the team.
Instead of gutting the house from the get-go, furnishings came first, followed by a bathroom renovation several years later. Many of the most meaningful updates are nearly invisible: restoring original wooden windows, repairing chipped moldings, skim-coating cracked plaster walls, and generally coaxing the old house back to itself. “It’s a lot of stuff that you don’t really see,” the designer explains. “But once it’s restored, it just feels more sound.”
The slower pace ultimately shaped the interiors. “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.”
Rather than decorating from scratch, the couple worked with Kloythanomsup to round out the walnut furniture from their New York apartment with vintage pieces, emerging artists’ work, and smaller finds that are personal rather than purely decorative. Even the less glamorous realities of daily life were addressed with the utmost care, from the bedding—the homeowners ordered 10 linen sheet samples to compare colors and textures before committing—to bathing the corgis.
One request shaped the upstairs bathroom renovation: a hand shower to easily rinse the pups. With post-bath shake-offs and muddy paws in mind, durable surfaces and finishes became part of the equation. Still, the finished room doesn’t scream utilitarian. The design scheme started with a sunny yellow Room & Board vanity that Kloythanomsup stumbled upon, which ultimately inspired the color-matched paneling throughout the space. Green field tile in the shower, checkerboard floors, and storage concealed behind a jib door ensure the room never drifts too far into “dog bath” territory.
Elsewhere, the details are quieter but no less thoughtful. In the living room, the fireplace is lined with antique Dutch Delft tiles in oxblood and brown tones rather than the traditional blue, each one hand-selected for its animal motif. The husband’s moody gray-blue office doubles as a guest room thanks to a custom daybed setup, where two stacked twin mattresses can be separated when their niece and nephew visit. And in the primary bedroom, Kloythanomsup paired olive walls with a pale blue ceiling, inspired by the pastel porch ceilings of the South. “I can imagine them resting really well in that space,” the designer says.
For the wife, though, 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.” In fact, nothing about the house feels rushed—not the restoration work, not the collecting, not even the bed linens.
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