SHARE THE LOVE
THE VP OF LYFT TURNED TO JON DE LA CRUZ TO DESIGN HIS CASTRO HOME, WHERE SHARING IS ALWAYS ENCOURAGED
The VP of Lyft at home, where sharing is always encouraged
The tech industry’s bottom line — modernization at all costs — seems a tad paradoxical in San Francisco, a destination celebrated the world over for its heritage landscape. As successful young tech operatives move into the city’s beloved historic homes, some consternation from the architectural purists among us is natural — will the city’s new guard truly appreciate the history of their investments?
When Brandon McCormick, the VP of communications at ride-hailing company Lyft decided that the modern SoMa condo he was living in wasn’t quite the right fit, he purchased an 1886 Victorian in the Castro for, among other things, its authenticity and familiarity. As a Bay Area native, McCormick felt deeply connected to the architecture. Even though he claims to be bereft of the “design gene that many gay men seem to have,” he knew that the best way to respect the house was to make it a home — which meant turning it into a regular haunt for friends. “If we were undecided on a place to hang out, I wanted my house to be so inviting that it would be the only logical choice,” says McCormick, who tasked longtime cohort and Oakland-based interior designer Jon De La Cruz with unifying this particular definition of home with the house’s pedigree by giving the decor as much permanence as the architecture.
The first order of business was to gently steer the 39-year-old bachelor’s taste for sculptural pieces away from, says De La Cruz, “the quick and easy modernism of Design Within Reach” and toward a more rarefied selection of “opinionated art and objects.” McCormick’s existing furniture cache included such midcentury standards as a Noguchi coffee table and an Eames lounge chair. “I wanted to loosen his grip on midcentury design and
bring in more uncommon pieces from all eras, chosen only for their individual integrity,” says De La Cruz. “I knew that if he started collecting more meaningfully, learning about the pieces, appreciating them for more than just their apparent beauty, he’d be really proud of them.”
The lofty main floor of the home is anchored by an open kitchen and dining room, where a core group of friends often gathers around a Saarinen Tulip table, surrounded by 1960s Johannes Andersen dining chairs. Like so many other objects in the house, the seats don’t outwardly appear to be comfortable — “until you realize you’ve been sitting in them for hours with no discomfort,” says De La Cruz, who attributes the surprisingly ergonomic experience to the exquisite “spine” of the chairs’ rosewood backrest.
At these jubilant TGIF dinners, guests may find themselves devouring McCormick’s culinary specialty — “industrial-size nachos” — or twirling takeout spaghetti pomodoro from Delfina around the three tiny tines of an Arne Jacobsen fork. The matte-steel flatware, painstakingly arranged in a kitchen drawer (McCormick claims his near-compulsive neatness is the result of growing up amid daily pandemonium — “I had three sisters and a mother who ran a day-care business out of our house, so I’ve always craved order,” he says), exemplifies design futurism, ironic considering its 1957 origin. “How big do you really need a fork to be?” asks De La Cruz.
Such décor-related inquisitiveness is often overheard at McCormick HQ. Chief among the ruminations: “Where will I land if I sit here?” (The family room’s Leandro and Gaite Rolo chairs, fashioned with padded rollers, have the funhouse appeal of a Rube Goldberg contraption.) “Is this the study?” (Even though the basement game room forgoes an antique bureau plat for a vintage marble sideboard stuffed with movie candy, eschews office chairs for mod Milo Baughman chrome lounges and renounces a dutiful conference table for a custom pool table, its walls are nevertheless covered in Deborah Bowness’s Genuine Fake Books wallpaper, which causes temporary confusion. De La Cruz minces no words about the irreverent design. “We’re not working here. We’re playing.”) And lastly, “Am I being watched?” (Early in the project, De La Cruz placed identical vintage Italian hexagon mirrors in the living room because they resembled a pair of old-fashioned spectacles. “Mirrors are a great way to fill wall space until you’re ready to commit to real artwork,” says the designer.)
With De La Cruz’s guidance, McCormick’s art collection has evolved from a ubiquitous “Prada Marfa“image — still beloved and hanging shotgun in the entryway — to more provocative works. Owen Kydd’s 2015 video installation “Knife, Sole, Feather, Scrubbers,” located on the main floor near the stairwell, is one more hypnotic screen for the fastmoving tech age that ironically chronicles the passage of time with a very slow rotation of four images. “Medusa,” by Adam Fuss, is more old-fangled but no less gripping — the towering 2012 photogram depicts snakes slithering inside a ghostly sheer wedding dress, its haunting ethereality a counterpoint to the family room’s bulky, low-profle pieces, such as the sprawling Flexform sectional sofa where McCor-
mick “hibernates” while watching — on a more familiar screen — episodes of “Law and Order.”
In choosing the home’s anchoring work of art, De La Cruz and McCormick returned to the city’s iconic landscape, choosing a monumental 2013 diptych by John Chiara, “Embarcadero at Interstate 80, Variation A,” which fills the stairwell with its glowy orange and black composition — an atmospheric coup. Depicting the underside of the Bay Bridge, the 50” x 75” piece — made with a one-off camera obscura specially built by the artist — are also deeply nostalgic, as you might expect them to be if you had been traversing that four-mile span your entire life. “If something is part of your soul, then it should probably be part of your home,” says De La Cruz.