The Talent:
Craig Leavitt and Stephen Weaver

By Diane Dorrans Saeks

Who says it’s essential to live a hop and a skip from Albert Hadley’s New York pad to be considered chic in the design world?
The prodigiously prolific and talented interior design team of LeavittWeaver live and work in Modesto, in the sun-struck heart of California’s wine-growing San Joaquin Valley.
Craig Leavitt and Stephen Weaver, now in their fourth decade as design partners, have made a virtue of living outside the flash and fanfaronade of city life. They covet the solitude and peace of working in their childhood hometown.
In their spacious 10-person atelier, LeavittWeaver craft distinctive one-of-a-kind furniture and lighting, a design collection sold through national showrooms, as well as singular interiors for ultra-private clients from San Francisco to Arizona and yes, even New York City.

Q: You have a very dynamic, lifelong design partnership. Do you always work together on projects? Do you always agree on every aspect of design?

CL: We work on every project as a team. We do not always agree, and that is our secret. However, we balance each other, and the end result is cohesion of our thoughts. We approach things quite differently and it is these differences that allow us to create that melding without having to acknowledge it with one another. It is pure magic.
Early in my design career, I experienced the design processes of pros like Val Arnold, David Williams, Anthony Hail, Billy Baldwin, William Pahlmann and Albert Hadley. Everyone approaches design from a personal viewpoint.
Stephen approaches a project from an interior architectural and furniture design perspective.

SW: We challenge each other, we encourage each other and I think that is one of the keys to a successful partnership.
We seldom agree in the beginning, but there is always a sound consensus before we move ahead. This is the heart of our collaboration. Our two distinctive perspectives give us a parallax view (parallax being the angle inclination between two sightlines to a defined goal). This allows us to hone in on the creative target at hand, and to design a world appreciated by our clients.

Q: What is the secret of the longevity and success of your firm?

CL: Albert Hadley taught me years ago that decorators should never use a client’s projects for mere self-expression.
Many of our clients are visionaries who join Stephen and me on a creative journey. The process with them is exciting and fulfilling. With each client we allow ourselves to learn, grow and push the envelope.
Billy Baldwin taught me the importance of being self-aware, and to understand individual taste — both the client’s and the designer’s. We set out to create a design result that personifies the client’s vision.

SW: Our best work is reinvention. We work closely and attentively with the client and the project. We don’t focus a “style” or a “look.”
Interior design should be a reflection of your client’s wants, needs and soul, not a self-absorbed canvas for the decorator. Our success lies in our ability to connect with clients.

Q: What is the most fun you ever have designing?

SW: We thrive on challenges and one-of-a-kind projects. A client approached us about making a table from an 18th-century, 4x6-foot, antique, pietra dura and marble slab map of France that was said to have originated from the palace of Versailles — apparently from the “war room.” It was fabulous! The client requested we design a table to encompass this important piece.
After numerous sketches, we decided to make the original map the cover of one of three stone books, all resting askew on fur Neoclassical legs bound together by a grillage shelf of parcel-gilded bronze.
The top book included a spine of malachite while the legs were veneered in a mosaic of petrified algae. The two green hues danced together and brought the piece to life! Exquisite.

Q: Craig, you’re obsessed with beautiful textiles.

CL: A world of uncharted history resides in antique textile shops and museum storage departments. Asian embroidery has been a passion since the designer Anthony Hail gave me a glorious gold silk-satin Chinese fabric with figures embroidered in a shimmering pale gold thread.One summer, Albert Hadley arranged for me to visit the textile room at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Drawer after drawer of exceptional, glowing examples of silk and gold threads, an instant education!

Q: You both design in so many different materials — from steel to carved and gilded wood, along with rare woods and shagreen, cast bronze and aluminum, and powder-coated steel.

SW: We experiment out of pure curiosity. I love pushing the envelope on design to figure out how materials come together. We strive to bring our imagination and our clients’ dreams alive so that together we pump life into the project. Every new design is a new opportunity for us to learn and dream and work with new materials, in new ways.

Q: Your production pieces such as your powder-coated steel Zig Zag table are very versatile. They look great in rooms ranging from Albert Hadley’s New York living room to a clean-lined loft in San Francisco.

CL: We underscore that versatility is a basic design principle, along with harmony, proportion, scale and color. Well-designed pieces, regardless of era and style, should be able to co-exist in a space with modern and classic and other styles.

SW: Maintaining our own workshop allows us to do constant research and development on production pieces.
I sketch all the time, allowing the sketches to remain fluid and flexible so that ideas progress faster.
Once a sketch has manifested, our workshop produces a 3D rendering. We often build full-scale models, particularly when Craig and I anticipate the project will be complicated. Drawings are helpful and invaluable tools to use in design, but we have found our best success in manipulating full-scale materials.

Q: Some of your production pieces started as designs you created for your clients.

SW: Yes, and vice versa. Production pieces such as the Zig Zag table spawned later pieces that range from origami beds, benches and a desk of ¾”-thick aluminum.
These products later inspired a new series of origami production pieces such as our folded aluminum tables (the Tri-fold, Four-Square and Trapezoid), and the Vortex table with its cut away negative shapes. These production pieces are simplified from the original custom design, in materials, fabrication processes and finishes, to reduce costs.

Q: Do you design every piece of furniture and décor for your clients’ interiors?

CL: We look at our work as interior architecture. We work closely and harmoniously with architects but also like Frank Lloyd Wright we like to make the interiors for our clients a complete journey and unified statement. We integrate our clients’ collections of art, antiques and artifacts alongside our furniture and design into an integrated whole.

Q: Your interior designs are unusually varied. You can do Louis XV–style carved and gilded chairs, as well as very futuristic metal lighting. Your aluminum and wood Fuselage table and desk look as if they are about to take flight.

CL: Creative agility is the ability to manifest what inspires us at the moment. As Stephen likes to say, “We are only ever here, there is only now. Make the most of it.” We can do traditional, we can do modern. We don’t push a signature style.
Our Fuselage collection for example, resulted from our work on airplanes and our consultancy with Boeing.

SW: I am drawn to the process of exploring an idea more than seeing the final product. For me it is about how far can I take this? We don’t design to achieve a “look” as much as we create to achieve the full expression of an idea such as movement in the case of Fuselage or metal-as-paper in the Origami.

Q: You are based in Modesto, not generally perceived as the center of the design world. What’s the upside?

CL: We’d like to think that LeavittWeaver’s presence makes it the center of design for the Central Valley!
Seriously, we feel grounded yet free here. Many may consider a place like Modesto, a two-hour drive from the nearest cosmopolis, San Francisco, to be less than a design mecca. I think such a locale forces creativity. Our design centers are internal, so being here in Modesto allows us time for contemplation.
We relate to Karl Lagerfeld, who could probably hole up in his apartment among his books, magazines and other objects and just keep creating.
We are originally from this area. Modesto is at the core of who we are as individuals and where our drive to create originated. We are happy here.

SW: We are like creative provocateurs so being physically away from a place like the Bay Area where designers and architects tend to congregate gives us the freedom to explore with neither external distractions nor expectations.
Everything is a potential inspiration source for those who are creative. For us, the curiosity is always there no matter where we are.
An additional upside to Modesto is the proximity to nature — we are surrounded by agriculture and riverine habitats. Our designs are informed by the boundary between man and nature. We gain inspiration from key elements in agriculture, which is historically on the front line where civilization engages the natural environment. Our classic Gear center table was informed by the mechanisms of harvest and irrigation.

Q: What’s next? Your Arizona residential project with architect Wendell Burnett looks dramatic and luxurious.

CL: This project is a fine examplefor whatcan happen when architects and interior designersconverse very early on. We’ve learned to think more like an architect. It's a two-way street. Our client has noted how much they hear Wendell talking like a decorator.
We stepped back. In the Arizona house, no matter how much I desired being involvedwithinterior fittings forfireplaces, Wendell didn't need me.

SW: The Arizona project is an example of how seamlessly our custom designs are integrated into the architecture, and vice versa, so that it is hard to tell where one stops and the other begins.
Our new furniture and lighting collections, such as LeavittWeaver One, which wewill launch this year,will use many of the processes we have learned from architects, such as reinventing our first metal Lightning table, using carpenterfinesse. We have learned different color sensibilities from architects. We’ve also re-invented early designs in new colors, like lacquering shades of whiteon the Petaltable, which was originally gold-leafed. We are trying a certain blue and nickel on our early Tabouret occasional table. We love lifelong learning.

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