Inside the Uniquely Blended Home of Silicon Valley’s Favorite Interior Designer
Photography by Roy Beeson
Katie Storey is a homebody. As the interior designer behind San Francisco’s Storey Design, she lives in a three-bedroom Bernal Heights home with her fiancé, writer James Nestor. “I relate to homes better than offices. I try and create the most comfortable space in my own home. Even my office is a little homelike.”
A decade ago, her life looked completely different. Storey was working on Wall Street and was burned-out. She’d spend her downtime browsing real estate and design blogs. Seven years ago, she quit her job, moved to Buenos Aires and started taking interior design classes. “I ended up spending a year in Argentina, living and plotting out a larger vision of what Storey Design was going to look like,” she says. After that, she moved to San Francisco and started taking night classes on interior design and working at the cultish brand Heath Ceramics on the side.
Her first big project was for a beach house in Santa Cruz, an hour and a half south of San Francisco. It was a blank slate: “It didn’t even have a role of toilet paper in it,” she laughs. Now she’s working on that client’s third home. Her clients veer toward the world of Silicon Valley.
Not that her design sensibility looks like the playgrounds-meets-futurism so favored by many startups for their own offices. “I say my aesthetic is modern with slightly rounded edges, where sophistication meets playful exploration,” Storey says. “What I mean by that is I like good quality, minimal products, clothing, design. I want home to be sophisticated, welcoming places. Not standoffish at all, warm and with an air of simplicity.”
It’s all on view in her home. She’s lived there for a year, since she and Nestor moved in together. But he had lived in the place for 10 years before, so there was a conscious effort to mix their styles and possessions. “It’s a blending of his wild antique swords with my more minimal bud vases.”
Their house is both playful and serene. There are, for example, two pianos. One was Nestor’s; the other was purchased early in their relationship. There’s a bedroom the size of a large closet with a no-phones rule. There are plenty of shaggy carpets where their dog, Face, likes to sleep. There are statues from his uncle and furniture from her great-aunt.
Favorite Places for Design Inspiration
They have all kinds of traditional-style large-scale rugs. I love to shop there.
This is a recently opened store that has textiles, pillows, and throws.
I find lots of vintage, very sexy feminine pieces of furniture here. They sell a lot online at 1stdibs.
I get most of my plants here. There are tons of succulents, California native plants, palms.
On Sundays I love to go to this flea market in Bernal Heights. I like to just walk around and see what the stalls have each week.
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