Chez Blackburn showcases couple’s Francophile style.
Athena and Timothy Blackburn leave their Sacramento Street high-rise for friend’s Parisian-style Nob Hill home
When Athena Troxel and Timothy Blackburn became engaged in 2001, a friend with a Nob Hill home hosted a party in their honor. The Frenchspeaking bride-to-be lived across the street and still remembers the moment the elevator doors opened and she first set foot in the apartment.
With its circular foyer, hand-scraped hardwood floors and antique French furniture, it was reminiscent of an 18th century Parisian chateau, a dream home for Troxel, a true Francophile.
“My heart skipped a beat,” she said. “It felt like home.”
Little did she know then that a decade later, it would be.
In the intervening years, the Blackburns spent weeknights at their pied-a-terre in San Francisco and weekends at their country home in St. Helena. But last fall, they had dinner with Andrew Skurman, the architect who had renovated their friend’s home, which was now up for sale.
“Why don’t you buy it?” he suggested. “It has your name all over it.”
“Why would I do that?” Athena recalled saying.
“Trust me,” Skurman told her. “I know what I put into it.”
It wasn’t long afterward that the Blackburns moved from their Sacramento Street highrise and into the 3,640-squarefoot pad across Huntington Park.
For the previous owner, Skurman took the apartment down to its concrete underpinnings. He drew upon the curved balconies of the building’s Beaux Arts exterior to create a curved foyer, curved hallways and a curved living room wall between two bay windows to create a French feel. Floors made of handscraped oak planks and French crown moulding along the walls continue the theme, while curved walls and halls contain hidden storage in poches, or pockets, behind custom panels that open with the touch of a finger.
A powder room was painted in a lifelike tortoiseshell pattern by faux finisher Willem Racke. The kitchen features a range hood reminiscent of the Eiffel tower. A spectacular dining room features brown lacquered walls and a gold-leafed ceiling emitting a radiant glow.
In architect’s top five
It was a remarkably lavish renovation, even by Skurman’s standards. He counts it among the top five projects in his career, calling it “one of the most beautiful homes in San Francisco.”
While the Blackburns keenly appreciated Skurman’s attention to detail, they also valued the work of the previous occupant’s interior designer,
“My heart skipped a beat. It felt like home.”
Athena Blackburn
Suzanne Tucker, and bought the apartment furnished. Among Tucker’s design highlights are a 12-panel Coromandel folding screen with palace scenes, dating to 1662-1722 and lining a living room wall, purchased from famed New York antiques dealer Joseph Rondina.
The home’s master bathroom earned Tucker a grand prize from the American Society of Interior Designers for its mirrored Art Deco-style vanities and a floating oval tub, whose shape and placement mirrors the curved exterior of the building and sits before a bay window in the bathroom. A series of doors from the bedroom through a hallway and to the bathroom create an enfilade, or vista, of appealing sightlines through connecting rooms.
Dining room
The dining room is also unchanged. Its walls, glossy from eight coats of lacquer, were inspired by a bittersweet chocolate bar Tucker found at a coffee house in Ross. A French Louis Xvi-style, 24-branch chandelier sold by Jackson Square antiques dealer Louis Fenton contains real candles, which can be lighted thanks to a winch that Skurman installed to raise and lowers the light fixture with the touch of a switch. The dining room windows are flanked by antique Italian console tables, bronze candelabra and two French 18th century mirrors that lend a regal air.
“Athena bought it 90 percent furnished, which is a wonderful form of flattery,” Tucker said, “but I love the fact that she is making it her own.”
To put their own stamp on the place, the Blackburns painted the foyer and hallways a dramatic French blue, with hints of gray and green, seen in chateaux across Europe. New couches, a large Belgian tapestry in the living room and a series of Salvador Dali drawings that had lain forgotten in storage were also installed. A new high-tech media system allows TVS and stereos to be turned on and programs selected in any room of the house with a tap on an ipad.
When friends come over, the couple serves rose and pistachio cookies by Elaine Bell Catering, the closest to Laduree macarons this side of the Atlantic, along with tea and sugar cubes adorned with red hearts from the famed Hotel Crillon in Paris.
Their first big housewarming was a party for the San Francisco Ballet to honor the grand benefactors supporting its season-opening night.
Fetes for other favorite causes are sure to be just around the corner, with Timothy’s Valentine’s Day gift to his wife of a specially commissioned ballet — choreographed by Yuri Possokhov, set to “The Adagio of Spartacus” — scheduled to be performed at Napa’s Festival del Sole in July.
In the meantime, the couple is enjoying the feeling of being in France without actually having to go there.
“It’s our Parisian home on Nob Hill,” Athena said.
“And not so overdone,” said Timothy, “that we can’t live in it.”