“If someone’s looking for an all-white home,” says San Francisco-based Jay Jeffers, “I probably will never get that job.” Walking through the rooms of this 10,000-square- foot, five-bedroom home in Atherton that he designed, it’s easy to see why.
The clients are of Indian descent and, Jeffers states, “They’re very colorful people. The house was white and done in a modern way, and they wanted it to reflect who they are from a cultural and personal perspective.” Yet apart from a mural in the entry hall depicting some elephants, nothing was to be overtly Indian.
Rather, observes Jeffers, that spirit would be expressed in terms of color and pattern. “Color to an Indian person doesn’t have a feminine or masculine,” he explains. “It’s just a vibrant, personal choice.”
Additionally, he adds, color has many meanings in Indian culture. He settled on a palette dominated by yellow, blue and green. Among other things, yellow represents earth and sand, blue, the ocean and infinity and green alludes to nature (particularly in the Indian flag). The combination of yellow and blue often also references the blue-skinned god Krishna in his yellow robes, which symbolizes an embodied form of transcendent, infinite reality.
The palette morphs as it moves through the house. In the dining room, Jeffers discovered wainscoting that had been covered up by the previous owners. He exposed and restored it, then painted it white, and above it, clad the walls and ceiling beams in saffron yellow. The husband’s office, visible across the hall, sports a teal-toned blue lacquer on its walls and ceiling. A downstairs family room, which Jeffers conceived as an adult-nightclub- style companion to the more child-friendly family room upstairs, mixes blues, greens and aqua tones.
Every room features not one but multiple patterns. These are not confined to wallpaper, rugs and upholstery either. “I’m a big fan of not forgetting the ceiling,” Jeffers states. “It’s always sort of the stepchild.” Arguably, the boldest pattern mix is the living room. Overhead is a knock-your-socks-off wallpaper that looks like a cross between shibori tie-dyed fabric and a woven rug. It’s impossible to ignore, yet it works seamlessly with the cut-pile spiral design of the rug, a blue strié sofa and the geometrics of the armchair and drapery fabrics.
Jeffers’ skill at pattern-mixing, in fact, is one of his firm’s signatures. “I like for there to be a variety of scale,” he explains of the dining room, where the ceiling showcases a wallcovering that looks like chair caning. To contrast this, he upholstered the host chairs at the custom dining table in a large-format kilim-like fabric and the rest of them in a more subtle, two-toned weave. On the curtains, he observes, “You have so much volume that I love using a large pattern there.” To wit: billowing yard upon yard of a verdant floral fabric.
The exception is the primary bedroom, which, Jeffers notes, “I wanted to be in a more restful category.” A medium-scale pattern decorates the window treatments in this room, but otherwise, pattern is confined to lamp shades and toss pillows, all of them unified by a neutral Phillip Jeffries grass cloth wallcovering and a warm wooden ceiling. Which is not to say, of course, that the room lacks character. It is awash in jewel tones, but of the lighter variety: amethyst, rose quartz, blue moonstone.
While color and pattern are definitely unifying themes throughout, however, Jeffers has a more fundamental goal. “The common thread is that I want all spaces to look unique to the inhabitants. It’s a project for us, but it’s a home for the people we’re creating it for.”
Photography by Matthew Millman.
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