This San Francisco apartment was ready to grow up a bit. “My client is a woman in her early thirties, a working professional who had lived in her third-floor walk-up in the heart of Pacific Heights for the past five years,” says interior designer Kate DeWitt. “From the moment I walked into her home for our first meeting, I could tell she had style, but a lot of it was still holding onto her twenties. She enlisted my help to clear out furniture that no longer worked and curate a more elevated version of her home for this next chapter.”

Pacific Heights itself is about as elevated as it gets. “It’s a beautifully historic residential neighborhood, and it’s also home to Sacramento Street, a generations-old stretch of design shops that we drew a lot of inspiration from for this project,” Kate shares. “I quickly learned she loved vintage furniture and had found a few one-in-a-million treasures over the years. Her real challenge was knowing how to pair things and pull it all together. She asked that we lean heavily on FB Marketplace, 1stDibs, and Chairish to build her a true vintage haven.”

With that directive, Kate set out to transform the living room, dining room, and home office. “We didn’t work against a set timeline; the priority was finding the right pieces, however long that took,” the designer notes. “The biggest challenge was patience, waiting to find the right pieces instead of rushing and settling for placeholders.”

The dining room proved to be the “game changer” for the entire design. “My client was hesitant to incorporate too much color, but after seeing it painted this deep sage green (Dry Sage by Benjamin Moore), she fell in love and gave me the go-ahead to bring color into the rest of the space,” Kate recalls. “Her existing Spanish baroque table, sourced on Facebook Marketplace, is a beauty, but its petite scale made finding chairs to match nearly impossible. So, we went custom. I designed linen slipcovered chairs that Gil’s Upholstery brought to life in a Pindler fabric, soft, tailored, and sized to fit. The result is a room that feels rooted in history but entirely her own, proof that one bold color choice can unlock a whole home.”

That newfound confidence with color carries into the office, where Benjamin Moore’s Sag Harbor Grey creates a quiet, grounded backdrop for a space meant to feel personal rather than purely functional. “The desk anchors the room, sourced through Chairish and shipped over directly from the UK,” Kate explains. “On the ottoman sits a silver tray that belonged to my client’s late grandmother, someone she was incredibly close to. It’s a small object, but it carries weight in the room.”

And then there’s the wall. “My client had quietly been collecting vintage tennis rackets for years, a nod to her lifelong love of the sport, without ever having a place to display them,” the designer tells us. “We sourced a few more to round out the collection and gave them the prominent placement they deserved, turning a personal passion into the room’s most striking feature.”

In the living room, patience once again proved essential. Kate kept the existing sectional and white lounge chair, brought in a carved Spanish console found on 1stDibs, and scored an antiqued floor mirror on Facebook Marketplace. “The coffee table took eight to nine months to source,” Kate shares. “We found plenty of good options along the way, but nothing that stopped us in our tracks or layered seamlessly into the design. It was frustrating at times, but we held out. When we finally found the right table, it fit both the size and the style we’d been chasing. It was the last piece we sourced for the living room, and it’s the one I’m most proud of.” 

That kind of patience is a challenge in the moment, but it’s ultimately what makes a room feel collected rather than decorated. “That was my main objective throughout the entire project,” Kate reflects. “As we neared the end, my client asked that we leave a few corners intentionally bare, because she’d enjoyed the sourcing and design process so much that she wasn’t ready for it to end. Throughout our work together, she told me she’d learned to trust her style more, to stop playing it safe and lean into what she’s actually drawn to. I acted as her guide through the process, helping her see her own style elevated in ways she hadn’t imagined, and now she has the confidence to keep building on it herself.”