Designed in England. Showcased in San Francisco.
Now in its 47th year, the San Francisco Decorator Showcase brings together visionary designers, artists, and craftspeople from the Bay Area, transforming a remarkable home while raising money to support the financial aid program at San Francisco University High School.
During the month of May, between 15,000 and 20,000 visitors walk through the showcase home. In 2026, we were proud to sponsor the event – and to see our details in 13 rooms, running through the Grand Victorian house like a quiet thread.
But with independent designers working simultaneously across different rooms, cohesion can be a challenge.
“Having Corston as that throughline through the rooms makes all the sense in the world,” says Shaundra Bason, director of strategic philanthropy at San Francisco University High School. “In a house where there are sometimes 40 different designers in the home, the flow works, and that’s a really important and very high-quality part of this project.”
Her colleague Elena Britton, director of development, adds: “Corston’s details really tie the bow on a home like this. It’s all those little details that make this so beautiful.”
We also spoke to just some of the designers who used our products across the house. Watch the video above, or keep on reading to find out what they had to say.
For Tineke Triggs of Tineke Triggs Interiors, who took on three spaces including “The Pheasantry” and “The Bakehouse Kitchen,” the English provenance of our products was an immediate fit for the brief she’d set herself.
A first-generation American with Dutch and Scottish roots, she’d spent over 30 years working with Victorian and Edwardian architecture in San Francisco and wanted the kitchen to feel like “a big house” – a communal, old-world gathering space rooted in craft and character.
“If you think about the house being Victorian and also bringing an English back story, Corston was the perfect solution,” she explains.
“The pieces are vintage-looking but have a very contemporary twist to them, so they’re very functional and worked with anything else I was bringing in the room.”
The kitchen was anchored by custom walnut cabinetry from Bakehouse of England, put through a fumed, five-step lime-washed process, and a Calacatta marble slab from Da Vinci.
Tineke wanted the electrical details to vanish entirely into their surroundings, so she opted for our clear plates to blend into the marble. And her approach to the kitchen layout was equally considered.
“I wanted no uppers. I wanted the windows and the light to all bounce off the marble and the cabinetry, and so the hutch becomes my upper cabinets, just like the old English home where you have the hutch holding all your flatware and plates.”
Robbie McMillan took a different approach in the room he named “The Chapel” – a dramatic space he and his firm, AubreyMaxwell, shaped around the architectural quality of the house itself.
“We started looking at the architecture of this Queen Anne Victorian and thinking, there are so many spaces that feel like that sort of chapel or church architecture,” he says. “And so we chose the word ‘chapel’ and this idea of creating a really warm space for gathering.”
Like Tineke, Robbie wanted nothing to jar: “We also wanted to have something that looked a little vintage, that wasn’t a brand-new sparkly sort of switch with a paddle. We wanted something that feels like it could have been here for a long time.”
In the dining room – a space Marsh & Clark Design called “A Gated Space” – principal Stephanie Fillbrandt and designer Dani Benak rebuilt the room from a “white box,” adding paneling, hand-applied ceramic ceiling details, a custom limewash in a soft blush, and a pair of custom bronze gates designed by Stephanie.
“We always envisioned the gates to be this dark bronze,” Dani explains. “And that’s how we chose our Corston finish as well…it really tied into our gates and the other finishes in the room to bring that edge and beauty.”
For the hardware itself, restraint was the aim. “We definitely wanted the paneling to shine in this room. And so the knob or the turn allowed for that. It just integrated seamlessly into the space.”
Andrea Halkovich of Sonoma Interiors, who designed the second-floor bedroom and an en suite she named “Birds of a Feather,” first came across our designs at Deco Off in Paris and was delighted to learn we were coming to the United States.
Her room was built around a House of Hackney wallpaper, a custom rug woven in India, and a spirit of community – with as many makers and artisans as possible sourced from Sonoma County.
The space was intentionally curved and feminine, and the hardware needed to echo that.
“I love that it’s a very elevated look. It’s not industrial and it functions beautifully. I love the feel of the knobs. This whole room is about being curvy.”
Published on 3rd June 2026
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