We are delighted that Ian Stallings Pied-A-Terre was featured in the premiere issue of Marin At Home magazine in January 2016. Thank you to Zahid Sardar for writing this article and to Aaron Leitz for the beautiful photographs. The full article is available here.
An excerpt from the article is below:
Uncommon Pied-A-Terre
Interior designer Ian Stallings' favorite getaway is none other than his San Francisco home.
BY ZAHID SARDAR • PHOTOGRAPHS BY AARON LEITZ
PHOTOGRAPH BY AARON LEITZ
“I suppose I had no option but to become an interior designer,” Ian Stallings says from his new apartment in San Francisco’s tony Bently Nob Hill, a 1920s Spanish revival high-rise by architect William E. Schirmer.
“When I was in second grade in Wabash, Indiana, my mother, whose parents were antiques dealers, gave me a subscription to Architectural Digest magazine because she thought I just might be interested,” he says.
Barely a decade later, Stallings left for San Francisco to study painting, filmmaking and design, and in 1999 he set off for New York, where, among other things, he was hired as a film production and set assistant to produce commercials for House Beautiful magazine.
“One day as we arrived on location, I immediately recognized Mario Buatta’s home from an AD article I had read,” Stallings says. Excited by the prospect of meeting the rockstar interior designer personally, Stallings, a self-described “expat from the Midwest,” had an epiphany. He wanted to be an interior designer too.
His childhood in Wabash had prepared him well. The tiny town of roughly 11,000 is not only the world’s first electrically lighted city, predating the prototypal electrified White City created for Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair, it was also the birthplace of Mark Honeywell’s iconic thermostat and the home, since 1911, of Edwin Ford’s indispensible water meter. It was these distinctions in the middle of nowhere, along with the financial largesse of the Honeywell Foundation and later the thriving Ford Meter Box Company, that together gave Stallings’ hometown a world-class $68 million arts center and exposed him to the world of arts and music. The country music star “Crystal Gayle graduated from my high school,” he says proudly.
While most Midwest towns are devoid of variety, in Stallings’ town, life at home was also “like being in a Ralph Lauren ad,” he says. “My mother had impeccable taste that veered between Hollywood glam and preppy looks. Paintings were stacked salon-style up the walls in our home; the fabrics were luxurious and the upholstery fantastic.”
He promptly returned from New York to the Bay Area in 2003 to practice interior design. After short stints at a couple of San Francisco interior design ateliers, he was ready to take on clients in 2008 — just when the economy tanked. He survived with a handful of loyal clients in the city and, since then, has progressed to large projects in Marin, the wine country, New York, London and Shanghai; an apartment at the upscale Yellowstone Club in Montana is among his best work.
PHOTOGRAPH BY AARON LEITZ
Read the full article and slideshow here.