November 2, 2025Brittany Giannone was practically born to be an interior designer.
Her father, Jeffrey Haines, launched his interior design business, in New Jersey, shortly before her birth, and soon thereafter, she was sitting on his lap at estate auctions and accompanying him to his antiques and homewares shop on Nantucket every summer.
When she was 13, her family’s historic home, in Bernardsville, New Jersey, burned to the ground, and they lost everything. Despite the trauma, she absorbed every detail of her father’s meticulous renovation of their next house. “It gave me the chance to see what Dad did every day, not only that it was fun but how it makes such an impact on people’s lives,” Giannone recalls.
In 2014, she opened her own interior design practice, ABD STUDIO (the acronym stands for authenticity by design), in San Francisco, where she had moved to try out living on the West Coast. Since then, Giannone has done a brisk business fashioning elegant, deftly layered interiors across the country — from a soigné downtown Manhattan loft to an inviting New England beach retreat to a crisply modern mountain house near Lake Tahoe. “I don’t want to re-create the same designs over and over,” Giannone says. “I’m a people person. I want to personalize the design. I want my clients to end up being my friends.”
One recent commission, to renovate the interiors of a 1906 Edwardian brick house in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, was for former employers: She used to babysit for the couple’s two young daughters when she first moved to the Bay Area. “As my design career grew, that early connection with this family evolved into a design collaboration built on trust — one that has made our work together especially rewarding,” she says.
It was a dream assignment. The house had fantastic bones — four floors, plenty of windows, all under a traditional mansard roof — but it needed a thorough restoration. Both Giannone and her clients, who were heavily involved in the design’s ideation and realization, “wanted to find ways to preserve the original architecture while creating a setting for a contemporary family.”
The goal, Giannone continues, was to craft something “formal but not too formal” that would also spotlight the couple’s knockout collection of mainly postwar modern art, including radiant works by Luc Tuymans, Sigmar Polke, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell.
The first order of business was to modernize the interior architecture, and that began at the front door. By removing part of the upstairs living room, San Francisco architect Ken Linsteadt — working with contractor Upscale Construction — transformed what had been a narrow entry into a dramatic soaring space, with a statement-making sculptural staircase featuring a curlicue iron railing.
Other architectural interventions included redesigning the previously dated, closed-off kitchen as a much more modern, open area that can be partially concealed with walnut-and-glass pocket doors. The dining room’s original ornate carved ceiling and the period moldings throughout stayed in place.
For the interior decoration, Giannone took inspiration directly from the couple’s background and travels, melding the Southern charm of Louisiana, where they were raised, with the spiffy sophistication of London, where they lived for a time, and the edgy energy of New York, where the wife, who is an artist, once worked at a gallery. “Being an artist, she is very comfortable living with color, and she gravitates toward modern art,” Giannone says. “Yet her aesthetic is very traditional. The challenge was to bridge the two styles for a seamless look.”
The designer deployed fanciful lighting, much of it from New Orleans galleries, and vibrant antique rugs, which established a refined old-world mood and a rich palette. In the entry, she paired a distressed-gilt lantern by Jamb with a carved-wood pedestal table by Alfonso Marina, both centered on a Khotan rug from the early 1900s.
Nearby, a bronze-legged, green-shagreen bench by R&Y AugoUsti, a 1stDibs find, looks like it’s part of the luscious landscape photograph by the Brazilian artist Caio Reisewitz above it. At the base of the spiraling staircase, a circa 1960 ostrich-egg lamp from Maison Charles perches on a mod custom-made daybed whose blue-wool upholstery picks up the flowers in a still-life painting by Giorgio Morandi.
The second-floor landing opens into the vast living and dining areas, which, despite their thorough refurbishment, convey a sense of the home’s 120-year-old history, while also referencing the many decorative eras, from the 1700s to the present, that Giannone navigates artfully.
English teak-and-cane armchairs from the 1930s, found at Obsolete, flank a beefy antique-looking console table of Giannone’s own design, which holds a 1960s brass lamp by Rupert Nikoli. A mahogany 18th-century English secretary mingles to charming effect with an antique Sultanabad rug and ottomans upholstered in a jazzy Schumacher leopard pattern, plus 1960s patinated-copper Brutalist sconces mounted between Corinthian columns original to the house.
Giannone had a very specific image in mind for the dining room’s table: that of one found in an old university library. There’s not much library-like about the enormous Olafur Eliasson sculpture hung at one end of that table, however, nor about the opulently patterned Rubelli silk wallcovering she used to clad the entire room. For seating, she paired 1967 cane-back jacaranda chairs by Joaquim Tenreiro from 1stDibs with library-like benches covered in a Jim Thompson velvet stripe.
Because the space was vast — nearly 600 square feet — she turned one end of the dining area into a salon, placing a Laura Gonzalez sofa and Tenreiro lounge chairs at a Massimo Castagna coffee table.
The primary bedroom features even more striking furnishings, like an early-19th-century French marble mantel that Giannone and her clients discovered in New Orleans. Other stunning pieces include a vintage Viggo Boesen lounge chair and vintage Barovier scalloped-glass sconces, all from 1stDibs.
It is a top-floor room — the husband’s “golf lair,” complete with indoor golf simulator — that packs the boldest punch.
An allover-pattern wallpaper, used all over, defines the guest bedroom, where a dramatic wing chair complements a custom blue-velvet-upholstered bed. The walnut armoire is French from the early 19th century.
The walls are upholstered in a snappy Ralph Lauren plaid, with a navy-painted niche holding artworks by David Salle and Wayne Thiebaud. A steel cocktail table in the shape of a chess piece by Anna Karlin complements an antiqued-brass paneled bar. Here, as elsewhere in the home, the husband, who works in private equity, gave his wife “the full runway with color,” says Giannone. The spirited array of decorative elements exemplifies the magic that can happen when an artistic client and a gifted designer are indeed good friends.
