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"View Slideshow\n\nAs Douglas Durkin tells it, something happened on the way to his not being hired as the interior designer for a sweeping renovation of a 1920s San Francisco apartment.\n\nThe owners, a couple moving to the city after long having had a primary residence on the San Francisco peninsula that was designed by architect Sandy Walker with Michael Taylor (they also have houses in Palm Springs and France's Dordogne region), were led to Durkin by Walker. Formerly a principal of a prominent local interiors firm, Durkin was then in the process of starting his own office and was operating, literally, out of his kitchen. \"I can laugh about it now,\" he says, \"but they were completely taken aback by my portfolio. They were hardly traditionalists\u2014their tastes were very contemporary\u2014so there was virtually nothing in my past efforts for them to relate to. We decided to end the interview and go to lunch, where we talked about everything except the project. The next day I got a call from them. They said, We don't like the work you showed us, but we like you.' They were going to chance it all on my ability to exceed my range and interpret the kind of space they wanted.\"\n\nTheir faith was justified. Durkin\u2014with his design director, Greg Elich\u2014transformed the dark, imposing 4,000-square-foot apartment (its great appeal, other than size, being location and views) into a light-hued environment that, in its simplification, became catalytic to a pared-down existence for the couple in general. \"They were quite ready,\" Durkin remarks, \"for a more contained way of living.\"\n\nThe linchpin of the design was the integration of the couple's contemporary art collection.\n\nSan Francisco-based Walker (\"whose blank canvases let interiors evolve,\" Durkin says) gutted the existing paneled walls, taking a period residence down to the studs and refashioning it within the codified restraints of the building. The architect was permitted few structural changes; that there could be no interference with the grid of the structural columns all but dictated the layout. By eliminating certain nonbearing walls, however, he made some rooms bigger and assigned others new functions. The entrance hall had extended all the way to the rear of the apartment; it now goes roughly halfway across, with the leftover area holding much of the reconfigured master suite. Two bedrooms were combined to make a library, leaving just the master suite and a guest room as the private realm. A small corner conservatory between the dining and living rooms was removed altogether, gaining view space and allowing for a bar, and the kitchen was entirely reoriented.\n\nAdding definition at the apartment's perimeter, Walker created deep-cavity window walls; radiators built under the windows make a substantial sill, a rich detail that adequately compensates for the slightly reduced floor space. The idea of thickness carries over into the furnishings by Durkin (\"Michael Taylor's natural heir,\" in Walker's estimation): the tri-part oak dining table; the cerused-oak beds and side tables; and the largest custom \"piece\": the cerused-oak-paneled library. Positioned, sparely, as bold accessories throughout, reclaimed teak timbers from Indonesia respond to the elemental shell\u2014rift-sawn oak and limestone floors, no baseboards, painted plaster walls\u2014with what Durkin calls the \"integrity, texture and life\" of recycled wood. He and Elich found a Balinese source for teak from abandoned piers and tobacco barns, which had not yet been veneered or made into boards. The infusion of this \"iconic material\"\u2014raw, salvaged\u2014was, they felt, essential in establishing the apartment's character.\n\nBut the linchpin of the design scheme was the integration of the couple's contemporary art, the remainder of a significant collection they had started in the 1960s. Decisions of where each painting and sculpture would be displayed formed an ongoing, interactive exercise between client, architect and interior designer. During design development, Walker's group, in a first for them, drew elevations that showed the exact paintings and sculptures so the clients could add, subtract and reposition before the actual installation. \"It was that important,\" Durkin explains. \"The art is who they are.\" Although many of the works went to auction for lack of space, \"it's still a carefully invested collection. Everything we did was subservient to the art, as they wanted nothing to distract from their experience of it.\"\n\nMost illustrative of the notion, as Elich puts it, of \"the art pushing the design\" is the setting for Ellsworth Kelly's 1975 painted-aluminum wall sculpture White Curve. The couple wanted the long, horizontal piece to be where they could most enjoy it: on the fireplace wall in the living room. The problem was one of proportion\u2014the fireplace was too small, relative to the art, and could not be modified. Seeking to tie together as well the wall and the fairly low ceiling, the designers lined the brick firebox with cast-bronze panels that continue outward as flanking elements; with the original mantel replaced by a deep white frame on three sides of the \"opening,\" the effect is of an elongated fireplace. The contrivance, says Elich, \"gives the Kelly its proper base\"\u2014it also lends balance to the most visually commanding artwork in the room, Frank Stella's 1961 Ouray. \"An existing condition led to a design detail we wouldn't have attempted if not confined by the dimensions and unfortunate positioning of the old firebox,\" Elich says. \"That dilemma handed us a very positive result.\"\n\n\"Good designers,\" notes Durkin, who ventured into uncharted territory with this sleek departure from his interiors repertoire, \"mold their talents to the needs of the client. I find a lot of what I see in the Minimalist vein not believable as to how people really exist in it: It's more often about the designer than the occupants. This isn't earth-shattering design intended to impress with its edginess but a representation, in physical terms, of a simplified and mature way of living.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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