A Sonoma Home in the Woods Balances the Serene and Bold

Interior designer Stephanie Meyer adds splashes of color to a sleek home amid the redwoods. Take a look inside.


Designer Stephanie Meyer’s biggest inspiration when planning an interior space is her clients’ preferences. “It doesn’t matter whether something is stylish or trendy,” she says. The aim is to create “what feels like home to them.”

When two Sebastopol clients — a well-traveled couple — wanted vivid French-inspired colors to be applied to their sleek and serene west county home, Meyer was faced with the challenge of incorporating saturated yellows, reds and blues into an otherwise white and clean-lined space.

Meyer, who runs interior design company AVCO Design, said the goal was to maintain “a light airy feeling honoring the beautiful views, but also infusing the space with objects that were meaningful and tied to the very global lives of the clients.” Her solution was to “ground strong colors and patterns into a neutral palette.”

The 2,700-square-foot modern home was built on two and a half acres on Green Valley Road in 2010. Floor-to-ceiling windows offer views of redwoods while white walls and vaulted ceilings allow the surrounding landscape to take center stage.

Meyer has added splashes of color to the home’s kitchen via deep cobalt blue kitchen cabinets and a modern art piece in red, yellow and blue. She has incorporated similarly rich colors throughout the rest of the home: On the porch sits two apple-red Adirondack chairs, in the entryway is an orange vintage chinoiserie cabinet from Sonoma Nesting Place in Guerneville, in a reading room is a white bookshelf that has been decorated with colorful books while chartreuse chairs, pink pillows and multicolor rugs add more vibrancy to the room.

The dining area brings the outdoors indoors with a live-edge redwood table, custom built by Petaluma’s Heritage Salvage, and combines three materials: wood in the dining table, metal in the Emeco Navy-inspired dining chairs and grass in the sisal rug that accentuates the space.

Interior designer Stephanie Meyer is the owner and operator of AVCO Design. (Christopher Chung/ The Press Democrat)
Interior designer Stephanie Meyer is the owner and operator of AVCO Design. (Christopher Chung/The Press Democrat)

Meyer and her clients selected a rich golden mustard for the walls of the media room. The room’s barn doors were painted an unusual but stunning color — a reprise of the kitchen cabinets’ cobalt blue.

A diptych of achromatic paintings — by artist, designer and TV personality Michel Smith Boyd — contrasts with the media room’s vibrant walls. “We loved that (the paintings) are of women of color and high contrast with the wall,” says Meyer, adding, “We wanted to make it a balance of feminine and masculine.”

Click through the above gallery for a peek inside the home.