Southern Roots, California Soul: Paige Kelly Interior Design Transforms a Presidio Heights Classic

When a couple transplanted from the Carolinas swapped their Southern roots for Silicon Valley ambitions, they brought with them something no algorithm could replicate: a deep, bone-deep love of home. Their new address — a stately 3,500-square-foot residence in San Francisco’s coveted Presidio Heights neighborhood — was everything they had dreamed of in terms of location and architecture. But it needed something more. It needed a soul.

Enter Paige Kelly Interior Design. The Los Altos-based interior design firm was brought on to transform the home into something that felt both rooted in the city’s architectural heritage and alive with the warmth of a Southern upbringing. The result is a remodel that defies easy categorization — and that is precisely what makes it so compelling.

From the moment the design brief was set, one guiding principle shaped every decision: honor the bones of the building while making room for the people who would live inside it. The home’s classic San Francisco facade — its bay windows, its decorative cornices, its quietly proud Victorian posture — demanded respect. Paige Kelly Interiors answered that call with a transitional design approach, one that celebrates the home’s architectural pedigree while weaving in the clean lines and considered comfort of modern city living.

But perhaps the most quietly poetic detail in the entire home is found in the walls  washed in a soft, hushed blue — a nod to a distinctly Southern tradition of painting porch ceilings “haint blue” to ward off spirits and invite good fortune. For these clients, far from the moss-draped porches of their childhood, it was a way of carrying home with them. The effect is immediately felt: rooms breathe differently under that sky-washed canopy, airy and contemplative, as if the fog rolling off the Bay had been invited inside.

Every furnishing in this Presidio Heights home tells that story. The living spaces are anchored by custom sofas, chairs, and an ottoman from A. Rudin. In the primary bedroom, an Oly Studio bed takes center stage, its sculptural presence grounded by a richly textured area rug from Madeline Weinrib. A refined settee, again by A. Rudin, completes the room with the ease of a long exhale.

Original art works by Mallory Page hang in both the kitchen nook and the primary bedroom, their abstract forms adding depth and movement to spaces that could easily have felt static. They are precisely the kind of pieces that reward a long look — and in a home this considered, looking closely is always the right instinct.

Throughout the home, custom window treatments by Magnolia Lane filter the Bay Area light into something softer and more intimate, with fabrics sourced from the storied house of Holland & Sherry lending the drapery a quiet luxury. Lighting selections from Visual Comfort and Currey & Co. punctuate each room with warmth, their fixtures chosen not simply to illuminate but to sculpt the space around them.

No home remodel is complete without at least one space that belongs entirely to its owners, and here the clients made their wishes unmistakably clear: they had become devoted San Francisco Giants fans. The mancave is an unabashed love letter to the team, its palette pulled straight from the ballpark. Far from feeling like a departure, the room is perfectly in character: a couple who embraced their adopted city fully and without apology.

What Paige accomplished in this Presidio Heights home is something rarer than a successful remodel: they have created a portrait of a life. Walk through these rooms and you feel the pull of two places at once — the fog and the hills of San Francisco, and the wide porches and warm evenings of the South Carolina low country. Neither is diminished by the presence of the other. Instead, they have been woven together into something entirely new.