San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Garden designer brings in the furniture
S.F. showroom is stocked with items meant for the outdoors but delightfully at home indoors
Given her career pedigree, the focus of landscape designer Katharine Webster’s new showroom might surprise you. It is devoted to furniture.
Webster has been transforming Bay Area residential outdoor spaces since 2000 and has been selected to design outdoor spaces for the San Francisco Decorator Showcase three times, including once when she was called in to pinch hit for a designer who had to back out. “My team and I, we mach schnelled,” she jokes from her seat on a low-slung Dedon module, bisected diagonally, with gray fabric on one side, dusty pink on the other. The piece looks and feels luxurious; not what you’d expect from something that’s waterresistant and stain-repellent.
“I grew up with an appreciation of object, product and beautiful things in the home,” says Webster. Her grandmother was an antiques dealer, and maintained an indoor greenhouse at her Bronx home, of which Webster has distinct memories: The humid air, pebbles underfoot, indestructible succulents and hanging plants. Blurring exterior and interior carried over into her Dash Lane showroom, which recently opened in Presidio Heights.
The products Webster stocks are destined for the outdoors, and she isn’t interested in being an interior designer. But her showroom, which has just a small back patio, makes an argument for using outdoor furniture inside, and finding ways to mimic nature in homes with little exterior space. “When you walk in here, there’s energy and movement,” Webster says. “You have angles and things moving in different directions.”
Pale yellow walls are punctuated by diagonal applications of green and coral paint (the
latter is a custom color she named Katharine Webster Inc.). Webster often prescribes diagonals — a tilted chair or rug, for instance — as a way to introduce energy into spaces. Three-dimensional structures made of stained pine slats hang in the space; they’re sections of an outdoor sculpture Webster made for the 2015 Decorator Showcase. Against one wall, Webster has propped a weathered antique wooden door from Provence in France (by way of Sonoma).
“I want to illustrate something here,” Webster says, picking up a hassock from its spot at a teak Palecek dining table and plunking it in front of one of the Dedon sectionals. The hassock, made of handwoven rope, makes fine impromptu seating. Outdoor furniture — often crafted to be repositioned at a moment’s notice — can do double duty. Ditto the Janus et Cie teak lantern with metal carrying handle that doubles as a side table. Teak, an insect-resistant hardwood, is a recurring material in the outdoorfurniture world — Dash Lane showcases several midcentury-inspired pieces from Summit in Monterey.
“These are smart, tailored pieces that could be at home in the home,” Webster says.
Throughout the threeroom space (two display rooms and an office that showcases small gift-worthy items, such as Mer-Sea candles in bisque ceramic containers), Webster has hung from the ceiling handwoven bamboo hurricanes from Belgium and a pair of synthetic ferns that look alarmingly real. Webster is a proponent of good-looking fakes used minimally; real versions of her synthetics, for instance, wouldn’t fare well indoors. Hanging things from the ceiling can obscure unwelcome views from nosy neighbors or passersby, but for Webster, they serve another purpose, too.
“You feel sheltered, like you’re sitting under a tree,” she says. “There’s something protective and sheltering and wonderful about that.”
Andy Wright is a freelance writer. Email: food@sfchronicle.com