First of all, there are the views.
From a peninsula on Mission Bay in San Diego, they’re highly visible inside a home designed in 2018 by local architect Marengo Morton.
Then there are the clients: a retired couple in their forties originally from Washington. They moved here recently to be closer to their children and grandchildren.
Except when they’re traveling around the world, scoring sculptures and artwork to display inside their home’s new interiors.
California Casual
There’s interior designer Kristyn Harvey, who provided a striking ethos that ties vistas, clients and aesthetics together with grace and warmth. She’s a natural at it – stepping away in 2022 from her former career as an intensive care nurse into the world of design. She began by renovating two homes of her own, then took on projects from friends and families.
Here, she was brought in to leave the outside intact, but to rethink the entry, living area, kitchen, baths, and four bedrooms. “The exterior of home is their style but the interior’s white and gray were just not,” Harvey says.
Her clients are more attracted to a California Casual look, with a woody warmth. “We didn’t do a lot of renovation but added white oak shelves beside the fireplace and wallpaper in the bedrooms,” Harvey says
She added warmth with sofas, rugs and roman shades. “We wanted it to be coastal but not nautical,” Harvey explains.
That starts at a transparent front door – a huge, pivoting piece of glass. Inside the foyer a three-foot-by-four-foot section of a Turkish olive tree is wall-mounted. It’s a hundred years old and hand selected from photos. “We shipped it in raw and put a marine-grade, clear matte finish on it,” Harvey details. “It’s coastal and worldly – they cut through a big piece of the root and sent it to us.”
More whimsical but still warm was the clients’ existing sculpture that she placed in a bathroom, a piece known as the bronze bunny. “It’s such an odd and unexpected object,” Harvey says. “And placing it in the bathroom just amplified the mystery and the playful storytelling vibe it brings.”
For bigger features like rugs and sofas she selected warm beiges for a neutral and sandy brown kind of tone. It’s a carefully chosen palette that doesn’t interfere with the views. “Nothing is very loud,” Harvey says.
Warm, Coastal Touches
She added personality in her choice of smaller accessories, like an Indian block print on pillows for the sofa, and jellyfish and blues that recall flowing water.
She used performance fabric, a weave of polypropylene and material whose threads are treated with coating to resist stains. “Stains bead up instead of soaking in,” Harvey explains. “Also, a lot of the art we placed there is UV resistant.”
Older pieces of furniture took precedent over newer ones. Harvey values antique pieces that are decades old over brand-new works. The entry rug is a sky-blue vintage Turkish carpet from the 1970s The marble coffee table is an older piece as well, with a chipped corner that she repaired.
In the dining room, the interior designer took both views and grandchildren into account as she selected seating around a warm mahogany table. The scale is low so her clients can sit at the table and look straight out to the bay. “Then we brought in swivel chairs for the dining room so people can turn to talk to the kids in the living room at Christmas,” Harvey says.
In essence, she gave her clients precisely what they wanted: Interiors that are warm and coastal, in spaces where California Casual meets a world of art.