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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.
A REAL
TRANSFORMATION
With a few elegant moves, Sausalito designer
Martin Kobus gave a tired Belvedere kitchen
and living space a much-needed face-lift.