At COUPAR, we take holidays seriously, especially Halloween. We love our local haunted mansion, the Winchester Mystery House, in San Jose. Firearms and ammunition heiress Sarah Lockwood Pardee Winchester built the Queen Anne-style estate from 1886 to 1922. Along with its 24,000-square-foot labyrinth of 160 rooms, it has stairs, doors, and windows that lead nowhere.

“To create, one must first question everything.” Eileen Gray

June is Pride Month for the LGBTQ+ community, and COUPAR profiles Modernist architect, designer, visionary, and openly bisexual Eileen Gray (1878-1976).

Frances Adler Elkins (1888 – 1953) may have been born in Milwaukee, but Dorothea Walker, former West Coast editor of Condé Nast, dubbed her "the first great California decorator." A favorite of San Francisco society, Elkins often teamed up with architect Gardner Dailey and landscape architect Thomas Church. As the younger sister of architect David Adler, she frequently visited him in Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts.

“The lines are all Mr. Trumbauer’s, but the shadows are all mine”— Julian Francis Abele. February is Black History Month, and COUPAR celebrates Philadelphia-born classically trained architect Julian Francis Abele (1881 – 1950).

Herb Caen described designer William "Billy" Gaylord as a style icon. When Gaylord passed away in 1986, Dianne Feinstein recalled his love of life and mischievous humor. She was one of his pallbearers, along with Willie Brown, Boz Skaggs, Bill Blass, and Calvin Klein. From Mesquite, Texas, Gaylord moved to San Francisco in 1968. A few years later, at the age of twenty-five, Architectural Digest published his brilliantly pale Nob Hill apartment.

Before The San Francisco Design Center’s development in the 1970s, interior designers frequented "To the Trade" showrooms North of Market in historic Jackson Square. Just as it took vision, ingenuity, and hard work to transform SOMA's vacant warehouses and factories into a design mecca, so did the restoration of the neglected Classical Revival and Italianate commercial buildings in Jackson Square.

June is Pride Month for the LGBTQ+ community, and COUPAR profiles the "King of Hollywood Regency," William "Billy" Haines (1900 – 1973). Haines was an accidental interior designer. The Virginia native came to Hollywood via New York City, where he lived openly as a gay man in bohemian Greenwich Village, working as a model.

Photographer Cecil Beaton captured Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl (1865-1950), wearing her "Apollo of Versailles" velvet cape in her Paris apartment during the late 1930s. Elsa Schiaparelli designed the one-of-a-kind couture piece for de Wolfe to reference her taste for eighteenth-century fashion and the spectacular. It also celebrates the Apollo Fountain and its proximity to the interior decorator and socialite's home, Villa Trianon, in the Parc de Versailles.

COUPAR's client Rebecca Katz Art located in Sausalito's landmark Industrial Center Building (ICB), will participate in the Winter Open Studios. Before the massive 107,000 square feet structure was an artists' community, it was home to WWII shipbuilders.

As we celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, we acknowledge how early Spanish and Mexican occupations defined San Francisco's built landscape. The Bay Area's Mediterranean climate and abundance of adobe material adapted well to Spanish colonial architecture.

The long wait is over for interior design aficionados. Rizolli has compiled Fred Lyon's residential photos of San Francisco's wealthy elite spanning from the 1940s to the 1980s. While this ephemeral world no longer exists, it has influenced generations of designers.

As we celebrate Earth Day, we reflect on a unique community designed with environmental respect at the forefront. In the 1960s, architect and developer Al Boeke created Sea Ranch in Sonoma County.

To celebrate Women's History Month this March, when we reflect on women's contributions to American history, society, and culture, COUPAR looks at the life of Edith Wharton. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short-story writer accurately depicted the lives of New York's upper class during the Gilded Age.

African American architect Norma Merrick Sklarek acted as project manager for the center designed by Argentine-American architect César Pelli on the Pacific Design Center. Sklarek's career as a trailblazing black woman in a white male-dominated field is just as noteworthy as L.A.'s design mecca.

Feeling a bit nostalgic, COUPAR looks back as the Ghost of Christmas Past at how San Francisco celebrated the winter holidays

Legendary Bay Area architect and engineer Julia Morgan's buildings etch the California landscape ranging from the opulent Mediterranean Revival mansion, Hearst Castle to the rustic Arts and Crafts splendor of Asilomar Conference Grounds. We profile Morgan and her legacy in honor of Women's History Month.

March marks Women's History Month, where we reflect on women's contributions to American history, society, and culture. When we look at the history of interior design in America, a significant influencer happens to be the British design legend Syrie Maugham (1879 –1955).

February is Black History Month, and COUPAR celebrates trailblazing African American architect Paul Revere Williams' prolific career. Nicknamed the "Architect to the Stars," Williams shaped the Hollywood landscape designing elegant, perfectly proportioned mansions for gilded celebrities like Tyrone Power, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, and Lucille Ball.

Do you remember going to parties? In the pre COVID world of Hollywood in the forties, fifties, and sixties, entertaining was gloriously hedonistic. The backdrop for many of these gatherings were homes designed by the architect to the stars John Elgin Woolf.

COUPAR's Galleria location affords us not only a catbird seat to everything happening in the design community but also a link to San Francisco's urban history. The San Francisco Design Center developed in the 1970s when the once industrial South of Market air smelled pungent with the acrid scent of commerce.