Дизайнер Хидди Кайлер вернулась в Сан-Франциско и превратила скромный дом в яркое произведение искусства

By the time designer Heidi Caillier landed in San Francisco back in 2005, she’d sampled enough of the world to know that this time, she’d found her place. From childhood to young adulthood, she lived a peripatetic life, first in a military family that bounced from city to city, then at school in Providence and New Orleans. She graduated with a master’s in public health, and spent long stretches working odd jobs and traveling abroad trying to find her center. By the time she settled in the Bay Area and met her husband, Justin, she was ready to root. Inspired by the city’s architecture and culture, she eventually turned a longtime passion for interiors into a nascent design practice. She was plodding along with modest projects through the now defunct platform Homepolish. But when she passed the regal houses in the notoriously expensive city, the dream of designing one for a client, let alone carrying the keys to one in her own pocket, seemed well out of reach. “Career-wise, I didn’t have big goals at that point,” she says, setting the scene of the “before times,” when the life she fantasized about seemed unattainable. Then in 2015, feeling the need for a change, she and Justin decided to move to the Pacific Northwest to be closer to family and friends. “Justin was opening a bar. I was doing really small work, and I was feeling like maybe it was the end of that for me,” she recalls. Adding to the sense of starting a new chapter, on the drive out of the city, “we actually found out we were expecting twins!” Though at first Caillier worried the move to Tacoma would be the demise of her career, the relocation was integral to her developing aesthetic. Gray, foggy days encouraged cozier interior spaces with dusky color and layered textiles that make low-light rooms come alive. She embraced classic English prints, mixed with pieces from contemporary American brands like Nickey Kehoe and midcentury European lighting, to create modern homes anchored in tradition. And her young sons got to grow up hunting for crabs in tide pools. Some might say that her Washington state years were a necessary step in a master plan, making this return to California, and into an elegant Victorian she redesigned, possible. “Now we are back in this city with a beautiful home,” says Caillier. “I have had some success, and all of this that I never thought was possible. It’s been such an easy homecoming.” The years she spent in the Seattle area were transformative in every way. Her deft navigation of social media and the world she and longtime collaborator photographer Haris Kenjar created with moodily lit photos, depicting interiors that feel both aspirational and unpretentious, has helped her build an Instagram fan-base of nearly a half-million followers. By 2025, Caillier was selected for the AD100, and earlier this year the mountain house she designed for Kendall Jenner, the one with the yellow plumbing fixtures and mega sofa, was a social media sensation when AD published it. Her furniture collaboration with Lulu and Georgia has been lucrative. And her business has grown so much that projects send her small team zigzagging the country for installations. Things got so busy that when Justin had to close the bar due to COVID, it made sense for him to stay home to care for the boys full-time. Still, the Bay Area beckoned. “We had been marinating on the idea of returning, so we were casually looking at houses. It was trepidatious, and a really slow process,” says Caillier, who admits to exhausting her real estate agent in the hunt for a place within their budget that had provenance, in a pocket of the city south of the Presidio. “We had put an offer in on another house and lost it. Then I flew down for work and saw this one, and I thought, We can do something good with it. It was old and very underwhelming, but it had the space that we needed, huge windows with insane light, and four bedrooms upstairs, which is so rare. I had to put an offer in right away. Justin came down and saw it a few months later and he absolutely hated it. But I said, ‘I have a vision, and you just have to trust me.’ ” Caillier hired a contractor and completed the work without an architect, to avoid the long wait time associated with special building permits, in a delicate dance that preserved the character of the original structure while updating and expanding the rest. “We kept the three front bedrooms pretty much intact, and then the primary suite completely changed. We removed a back stairwell, which didn’t seem necessary,” she says. “From the dining room back, the house was totally updated. Then everything else was cosmetic.” Caillier is not one to shy away from a challenge. Her voice is formidable, and prone to bold pronouncements like avoid recessed lighting, say, or white sofas. And her work has a compelling tension between playful florals and linear patterns, like a skirted chair sitting atop a geometric African rug. That confidence is evident in this home, with cabinetry painted in a bold, true red in the kitchen, a cobalt blue dressing area off of the primary suite, and “I don’t know, millions” of yards of fabric from London-based brands like Guy Goodfellow and Watts 1874 covering walls and headboards throughout. “Every designer will tell you that their own house is the hardest job, because you’re doing so much of it on the fly,” she says. Caillier relied on frequent collaborators, like muralist James Mobley, who painted her sons’ shared room, and the team at de Gournay, who designed custom wallpaper for the dining room, for support. The only people who needed convincing that a return to San Francisco was a good idea were her sons. “Justin and I put that brave face on, saying we know this is the right move, even though we weren’t even sure ourselves at the time,” she says. “It was a rough transition that first month. Once they made friends, it was fine. They never complain about being bored.” While Caillier is grateful for the Tacoma years, she’s excited about the easy access to culture and art that city living affords her active family. “I have so much love for San Francisco, which is undergoing a real renaissance. This was the kind of life I wanted for my family, and then seeing it all come together,” she says, pausing when her voice cracks a little. “Sorry, I’m getting emotional. But it’s so lovely.” This story appears in the October issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.