The Tops in Fops

Plotnik and Ducknik went to the 2006 SF Decorator Showcase House yesterday. This is another of those events they look forward to each year. The Showcase finds a mansion in Pacific Heights or Presidio Heights (that is usually being spun to be sold), empties it down to the walls, and then holds a competition to engage different Bay Area decorators to decorate one room each. Each bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, hallway, stairway, linen closet and garden from the original 1902 house is decorated, as are the modern add-ons such as the multi-purpose Palladian room, the entertainment center and the five car garage.

It is the Height of Foppishness, the Tops in Fops. Each decorator feels he or she must show off every possible trick in the book, so these rooms are crammed solid with fabrics from Brilliant Artisan currently creating in San Miguel de Allende; chandeliers from Young Up and Coming Lighting Genius in Milan; faux finished painting by Heinz Schlop/Schlopper of Berlin...and what's that underfoot in the Child's Bedroom? Is that a floor? No, those are quartz crystals, compressed in a factory in Belgium and then troweled onto a rubber backing before being nailed into the subfloor.

Would the child living in the Child's Bedroom like having to walk on rocks? Hey, this is the Decorator's Showcase. You want Mr. Rodgers, turn on PBS.

There are more mirrors than in Playland. No bed has less than 10 fluffy pillows. Each bathtub is filled with gardenias floating in the water. The whole house smells like Evelyn and Crabtree.


Then, of course, when the new investor pays $12 or $15 million dollars to purchase the house, everything the designers have done is ripped out so the new owners can showcase their own new stuff.

And yet...the Plotniks love these houses. Not so much for the over-the-top excessiveness (I mean, you couldn't climb into any of these beds without building an extra room to remove and store all the pillows), but for the homes themselves. They are hundred-year-old reminders of how San Francisco's ruling classes once lived, when the grand staircase was in the front and the servants' staircase was in the rear, when that coach house, now a bedroom/kitchen/guest cottage actually stored a coach and a horse.


Here is a photo of Lui/Louie Megottago, the Great Plotnik's Design Critic, posing on the Grand Staircase. Everyone should have a Grand Staircase.