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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.
Thanks to such clients, Stallings is always on the move,
so when he does come home, his 1,400-square-foot enclave
“feels like a pied-à-terre,” he says, where eclectic design
notions can take wing.
“I used to own a Victorian in Hayes Valley where I lived
for a decade, and I needed to shake it up in this new place,”
Stallings says. “Victorians can be really dark and I definitely
needed to have more light.”
So, in what used to be an all-beige space — albeit with
Schirmer’s signature arched doorways — Stallings’ current
perfectly smooth walls are now painted a pale shade of coffee
to complement San Francisco’s pinkish hues. “The paint has a
semigloss sheen and the walls shimmer in the ever-changing
light by day and night. The bay water is always in motion
and that reflection also alters the interior in inspiring ways,”
he says.
After dark, downtown views become a mesh of lines and
textures just before the city lights come on. “I am obsessed
with such grids and layering, perhaps because of my fine art
work and interior architecture training,” he says.
Even though the apartment is a rental, he focuses on every
detail and surface. For instance, Stallings loathed the fake
bronze hardware and inexpensive lighting fixtures that came
with the place, so he promptly replaced them with heavy
Baldwin brass knobs, Ralph Lauren brass sconces in the foyer
and sculptural chandeliers that are more in keeping with the
building’s history.
Golden refinished oak floors are layered with lighter carpets featuring gridded patterns and textures that complement
art on the walls.
In the living room, a mixed-media canvas above the
fireplace by Colleen Flaherty, whom Stallings represents,
“incorporates shed snakeskin fragments she collected at her
family’s almond orchard, so I found a natural woven grass
rug that resembles snakeskin,” he says.
A black-and-white Zak+Fox ombre fabric for roomy club
chairs and a Brutalist Belgian wood console from the 1960s
or 1970s from Coup D’Etat add more textural notes.
“I like to contrast delicate materials like paper with hard
surfaces,” Stallings notes. A male torso made of paper rests
“My mother had impeccable
taste that veered between
Hollywood glam and preppy
looks. Paintings were stacked
salon-style up the walls,
and it was like being in a
Ralph Lauren ad.”
