D AV I D D U N C A N L I V I N G S T O N

BY REED WRIGHT MAKEOVER

ABOUT A YEAR AGO, Julie Wainwright, the founder and head of The RealReal, an online luxury consignment art and fashion store, asked Sausalito interior designer Martin Kobus to update the middle floor of her trilevel midcentury modern home in Belvedere. It included a foyer and living room that guests saw first, a conventional kitchen on one side and a somewhat cramped dining room on the other.

Kobus happens to be Dutch with a penchant for European-style modernism. He had cleared out extraneous walls at his own formerly dark house by the water on Corinthian Island, and he’d raised ceilings to provide a loft-like living room with white walls for art and big picture windows. He suggested similar improvements.

To provide a sense of space, he and his client decided to remove a partition wall between the

Inset: The original living room had dark floors and a conventional fireplace. In the new space, Kobus bleached the floors, painted the walls a pale gray, and supplied new custom furnishings, and the tour de force is a new inset fireplace with a dark tile surround that makes the structure seem much larger than it is. The deck beyond the French windows has new glass railings in lieu of wood.