Meet Gail

Beautiful, Practical Solutions

Gail Schweitzer follows this dictate as gospel. It’s the principle that shapes each living space she creates, from a serene meditation nook to a full-blown home theater. Her motivation as a designer is to inspire clients to make beautiful, efficient use of every square inch.

That’s why those she works with tend to return with additional requests: to make a living room comfortable for guests, to create a work space that can double as a bar, to freshen a real estate property as a welcoming canvas for new owners.

Gail understands the power of good design to ease life’s transitions, from starting a family or moving to a new city to downsizing once the kids are grown or caring for ailing loved ones. In her fifteen-plus years designing custom San Francisco interiors, she has strategized with clients at all stages of life to achieve balance and tranquility.

Her ideal design challenge is transforming a modest space into a beautiful, multi-functional jewel.

Artful Ingenuity

Growing up in a Midwestern family of makers, Gail showed an early affinity for creative solutions. Her first design coup was a backyard playhouse, complete with two windows and a bunk bed. The bottom bunk served as seating while the top folded away on hinges. Her mother taught her to sew, which Gail parlayed into a college job working for a pair of European artisan custom upholsters.

She so admired the antique brass bed owned by a college art history professor that she made a copy for herself out of PVC piping. When she moved to San Francisco after graduation, she sold all her furniture—including the bed—to a neighbor who liked her style.

It delighted her when her father sawed the family sofa apart so her mother could turn it into a sectional. To this day demolition remains a favorite part of any design project. It’s cracking the eggs to create an exquisite cake.

Respect for the Design Process

Studying with world-renown West Coast interior designer John Wheatman at UC Berkeley crystallized for Gail what would become her life’s work. Spending time in his Union Street shop and studio and being invited to his Pacific Heights home were life changing. Her design aesthetic draws deeply from his example: emphasizing California comfort, quality of life, the marriage of the practical and the beautiful.

Williams-Sonoma founder Chuck Williams is another style guru. Gail worked at Williams-Sonoma headquarters in San Francisco during the height of the catalogue era, developing home organization products for Hold Everything.

She also spent twelve years studying Ikenobo Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging that originated as a form of Buddhist offering. Under the tutelage of Mr. and Mrs. Susumu Saiki in San Francisco, she had the opportunity to travel in Japan, staying in small ryokans and studying at the Ikenobo Ikebana headquarters in Kyoto. The rigors and rewards of a patient process, the practice of craft as a path to enlightenment, the understanding that balance trumps symmetry—these are the Japanese underpinnings of Gail’s work.

The creative endeavor that evolved, through private referrals, into Gail Schweitzer Custom Interiors is rooted in each of these transformative experiences as much as the myriad design triumphs in Gail’s portfolio.