The San Francisco designer’s singular style has earned her fans on both coasts. She tells C about letting the outside in, her trusted artisans, and why she will always love black
Words by DEGEN PENER
Photography by DOUGLAS FRIEDMAN
Art is never an afterthought for Nicole Hollis. The acclaimed San Francisco interior designer makes it a point to work in tandem with artists on site-specific commissions right from a project’s inception. That’s true whether it’s on her home turf of Northern California or in the Palm Springs area, New York, or Hawaii, where she and her family have a second home on the Big Island.
“It’s been really fun to bring craftsmen and artists into the projects and let them have a say in the process,” says Hollis, who since opening her own firm in 2002 has ascended to the top ranks of the design world. Clients seek out her refined interiors, which center calm minimalism while infusing spaces with poetry and personality.
Hollis’ new book, Nicole Hollis: Artistry of Home (Rizzoli, $65), offers a dazzling peek at many of her artist collaborations. For a client’s home in Silicon Valley, designed by acclaimed architect Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig, Hollis worked with L.A. artist and designer David Wiseman to create a shimmering and ethereal bronze screen, which draws on patterns from nature to create a dreamy landscape. “There’s this confidence and belief in the artists,” says Wiseman, who has collaborated with Hollis on half a dozen projects to date. “She commissions these incredible pieces, and they are all so unique and integral to her spaces. Art is always part of the DNA of her thinking.”
For the same Silicon Valley residence, Hollis worked with Italian sculptor Mauro Mori on the creation of a voluptuous biomorphic sink crafted from black marble. Other striking commissions spotlighted in Artistry of Home include collaborations with artist Pae White on a custom chandelier reminiscent of a kids’ marble run, in a home designed by Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta and with conceptual design firm Studio Job, which created psychedelic stained glass for a home in the Haight-Ashbury.
Perhaps the most extraordinary collaboration revealed in the book is an entire dining room conceived by French artist Ingrid Donat for a client’s home in Presidio Heights in San Francisco. The bespoke space has an air of formality — thanks to a checkerboard of hand-carved, burnt-wood paneling — as well as a feeling of singularity, as Donat created a custom bronze fireplace, dining table, and crown moldings, all scarified with patterning inspired by tribal art. “Art is where the most beautiful collaborations are born, when the world of one artist meets with another and creates an unexpected chemistry,” Donat writes in the book.
When her client later traveled to Paris and visited Donat’s own apartment, recalls Hollis, “she just started to cry. It was like a religious experience.” The designer says that for clients who are willing to journey beyond run-of-the-mill decorating, these types of collaborations “become a great story for them when they’re living in the home — about a significant piece that they were a part of.”
Hollis is as comfortable working with bold color as she is with neutral palettes. In the Haight-Ashbury home, her clients wanted a trippy riot of hues inspired by the residence’s history as a gathering spot in the 1960s for counterculture figures like the Grateful Dead. By contrast, designing a desert home in Indian Wells allowed her to tap into her innate preference for restraint as demonstrated in her first monograph, Curated Interiors. The beiges and tans of the interiors channel the sandy tones of the natural landscape and absorb the region’s distinct atmospheric hues at sunset. “We noticed that when the sun was setting, the mountain beyond would change colors and there would be these beautiful pinks. Keeping the furnishings to a neutral palette meant that the house can reflect those colors. The desert comes into the house,” says Hollis, who channeled nature in another way for a home in Pebble Beach built right next to the ocean. Across from large windows that frame views of the water and windswept trees stands a chunky walnut sculptural room divider created by designer Michael Anastassiades that speaks to Hollis’ love of materiality. “How could you not be inspired?” she asks. “We get to work in the most beautiful places in the world. I’m always looking at the site first for cues, for materiality and for color and texture and just responding to that and making sure that we’re really complementing that and bringing that into the space.”
“A dark, moody room is beautiful and makes me think of a Dutch painting.”
The respect and pride of place that Hollis gives to artists in her projects has roots in her childhood. The daughter of middle-class parents, she grew up in Jupiter, Florida. “Our house was a spec home in the middle of nowhere. I think it was like a kit home that my father ordered. So growing up, [I was] not really exposed to design.” In school, she recalls being ostracized and othered by teachers who couldn’t appreciate a kid who was more visual in nature. “I was mostly put in the corner. I mean, they really didn’t know what to do with me so they kind of left me on my own,” says Hollis, who was later diagnosed with dyslexia. “There were many times in elementary school where I was put in a closet and told to stand in there for not knowing my times tables. It was very isolating. I was in my own mind and in my imagination.”
Hollis eventually made it to New York, where she studied interior design at FIT. She moved to San Francisco before graduation to work for Starwood Hotels. Her formative professional experience was working for the acclaimed architect Howard Backen, known for his hulking barn-inspired residences and wineries. Encouraged by her husband, Lewis Heathcote (then a technology executive), she started her own firm just shy of her 30th birthday. Today her company employs around 100 people, and her husband is on board as the CEO. In recent years, Hollis has become a design force in the hospitality world as well, with projects ranging from 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay and the Kona Village resorts in Hawaii to the El Prado Hotel in Palo Alto.
In addition to their condo in Hawaii — which they bought in 2019 and which the designer says she doesn’t get to visit as often as she wishes — Hollis and Heathcote own a home in Pacific Heights. It’s actually a building that comprises three apartments. Decades ago, it was owned by architect Julia Morgan of Hearst Castle fame, who lived there from the 1920s through the ’50s. During their tenure, Hollis and her husband have put their own bold mark on the property, painting the exterior black (the exact color is Benjamin Moore Tar Black). “I like black. I’m not afraid of black,” says Hollis, noting that she often uses the color, although less front and center, for clients’ homes. “I think it’s so beautiful to have a dark, moody room. It always makes me think of a beautiful Dutch painting and sort of those shadows. To have a powder room that’s dark and moody I think is stunning.”
She admits she “didn’t get California” when she first moved to the state. “I was like, ‘What am I doing here?’ Everything closed early. I couldn’t get a cab.” Being invited by a friend to a grape crush weekend in Mendocino changed everything. “We get there and there’s a hot tub on a cliff over the ocean and a million stars in the sky. And it was like, ‘Oh, I get it. That’s why people live here.’ And then I went to Yosemite and it sealed the deal. And then I started traveling to Joshua Tree and driving down the coast of Big Sur.” For inspiration, she still loves visiting Big Sur, as well as Sea Ranch in Sonoma and Point Reyes in
Marin County.
Looking ahead, Hollis aspires to work with more architects and artists whose work she admires, and to do more projects in New York (her new book spotlights three projects in Manhattan). She also notes, “I have been working in L.A. for a long time, but some of those projects I can’t publish, so nobody really knows I’m in L.A.”
One thing she doesn’t aspire to is a mega-size house for herself. “What’s funny is my husband and I both love small spaces. I meet designers, and they have these big houses in Montecito with pools, and I’m just like, ‘Wow, that’s great.’ But I think keeping things smaller and a little more down to earth is more my style.” To wit, she’s got her sights set on finding a getaway spot close to San Francisco in the tiny enclave of Inverness in Marin (home to sculptor JB Blunk’s house). “We’re big fans of Inverness. That’s probably where I’m going to be buying my next home, my hippie cabin in the woods.”
MICHELLE MONAGHAN wears LORO PIANA jacket and skirt, CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN shoes, and VRAI x PETRA & MEEHAN FLANNERY jewelry.
Feature image: Wolfgang Tillman’s Studio Party, Olafur Eliasson’s Seasons Flare, and a chandelier by Mathieu Lehanneur hang in the entry of a residence in Silicon Valley.
This story originally appeared in the Fashionable Living 2024 issue of C Magazine.
Discover more DESIGN news.
See the story in our digital edition
