I lifted my head above the surface of the Mediterranean Sea and looked all around; each direction contained a view so stunning it felt almost unearthly. A thought occurred to me. “How could it have possibly taken me so long to get to this place?”
“This place,” Monaco in the South of France, with its burning sun, and surreally blue water, where a passionate affair between light and color emerges in a singular beauty. Henri Matisse expressed it perfectly: “When I understood that every morning I would see this light again, I couldn’t believe in my happiness.” Pablo Picasso understood it too, as did Marc Chagall, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, and many more painters who chased the light and got lost in the area’s intense, saturated colors. But me It took giving a speech at a design conference to get my travel-loving,
art history / fine art major self, there. I was wrong to wait, because being there changed me, captivated me, inspired me, and, as beauty always does, healed me.
Setting out to design an interior space, my thoughts, almost immediately, are framed by questions regarding the natural light. Where is the first moment of light? How does the light hit this particular place based on where it sits on the earth? I need to
gain an understanding of the natural light’s movement across the sky and through the home. Soon, I’ll start thinking about artificial light, architectectural light, ambient light, art light, and more, with the goal of ensuring that each of them, along with the natural light, come together in support of our human circadian rhythms. Through this union of multiple light sources, we gain harmony with our environment, and we are able to experience moments of awe that connect us to our soul.
Light and color are not simply partners entangled in a complex relationship, they’re the very essence of any room and every space. We use them to design the experience that will keep our clients happier and healthier, and to cause them to say, “I feel so good here, I can’t quite explain why, but I love how I feel in it.” I love hearing that sentence, and I can explain why: it lets me know I’ve done my job; I’ve understood and arranged the brilliant dynamics of those co-partners to create a space with soul.
A Happy Mood in Noe Valley
Some things never change much for me. Take the color blue, for instance, to this day, when I think about blue, my mind always takes me to two places: 1. the South of France, and 2. San Francisco. I realize that the latter might be counterintuitive given the city’s decidedly grey palette, but my long-term, multi-project and wonderful client has an eternal love for blue, and in this home, that love became the directive. But first, there is light. Light that’s needed to pull the color through, to express its depth, to bring it to life; and in a way, to become the color.
And so, when I move forward from light, a natural progression brings me to color, where layering it lets me create a mood.
This client was all in for color and mood: bright, happy and joyous and even musical. And while blue was their favorite, they didn’t stop there, orange was close behind. My personal prime directive is that everything I touch, do and create be inspiring. I never want my interiors to come at you all at once, but rather to reveal themselves subtly, and over time. Here, that meant respecting their deep and abiding color passion, by pulling in from nature.
Light and Color
