Two of Lookiloos’ favorite women whose fabulous homes have been featured on our site are teaming up Friday (April 17) for a good cause at Emily Joubert Home and Garden shop in Woodside. Judy Seiber, who owns Emily Joubert, will donate a percentage of her sales that day to the families of the Oakland police officers slain in March.

And her good friend, Lisa Rissetto, whose husband recently retired from the Oakland Police force, will donate the proceeds from her exquisite handbag collection “49 sq. mi.” based in San Francisco. Seiber’s shop is known for its collection of garden pottery as well as Arte Italica and John Derian housewares.

Local businesses, including the famed “Buck’s” restaurant where many a Silicon Valley start-up has been dreamed up, will also donate appetizers, as will Robert’s Market across the street. The Village Pub, Woodside Bakery and Draegers grocery are all helping with food and drinks to make the 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. benefit a success. Some wonderful gifts will also be raffled. The shop is located just off Highway 280, west into the hills, at 3036 Woodside Road.

Along with her home and garden shop, Seiber’s English cottage filled with treasures collected around the world was featured on Lookiloos last summer. And Risetto’s ranch-style house in Woodside that showcases vintage mid-century furnishings was also featured, along with her stylish, industrial studio in San Francisco where she designs her hand-stiched bags.

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Not much surprised Iris Harrell’s family when she left Virginia in her 20s to work as a history teacher on a Navajo Indian reservation, then toured the country for five years as a guitar player and singer in a pop and country band.

But when she put on a tool belt in her 30s and started doing carpentry, “they thought, ‘Have you lost your mind?’”

It all made perfect sense to Harrell, who is 62 now and CEO of her own Harrell Remodeling company based in Mountain View.

“If you can control a public school sixth period class on Friday afternoon and you can control drummers and other free-spirited, independent people and travel all over the country,” she said, “it’s pretty powerful training.”

For the past three decades, she’s been orchestrating designers, carpenters and subcontractors to create beautiful homes for people all over the Peninsula. She finally was able to focus on her own home in Portola Valley, which she shares with her partner of 30 years, Ann Benson. They completed a major remodel last year that is both universal — meaning it works for all ages and abilities — and it’s sustainable, meaning it’s “green” and has a roof with 54 solar panels. They built it as much for Benson’s 91-year-old mother as themselves. They installed an elevator as well as a bathroom vanity that lowers to wheelchair height.

The couple was first drawn to the area when they visited a friend in the Portola Valley Ranch subdivision, an early 1980s-era development of 200 homes nestled among hills, oaks and meadows. A nature corridors runs through the development, so wildlife is free to meander. That means all gardening is relegated to a fenced-in “community garden” near the pool and tennis courts. In 1992, the house that was built as the developer’s office — with 10 “bedrooms”, one-and-a-half bathrooms and no kitchen — came on the market. Harrell and Benson, seeing the potential, took it “as is”.

They did a temporary remodel back then to reconfigure the house to a four-bedroom, with a kitchen. But in July, they finished a substantial remodel, turning it into a showcase of modern green technology as well as comfortable, lifelong living. They started with a demolition party and invited Benson’s mother and her friends from their San Francisco senior citizens’ home. But many in wheelchairs and walkers couldn’t navigate the hillside house.

What a difference a remodel makes. They built a wooden ramp from the street level down to the front door, winding through oak trees along the way. They removed a wall in the entry hall and a closet in the living room to open the vista from the front door through the living room and out to the hillside views. To make the living room with 14-foot ceilings seem more intimate, they hung what they call “lighted quilts” from the ceiling. Made of glass that is stained in traditional quilt patterns, the floating piece of art is an homage to Benson’s love of quilting.

They reconfigured the kitchen to allow for “hers and hers” refrigerators and sinks. Since Benson is the main chef for the couple, her fridge stores all the fresh food for cooking. With Harrell’s fridge, on the other hand, “you take it out and eat it or put it in the microwave.”

The kitchen opens to a small eating area as well as an intimate sitting area that faces an energy-saving, gas fireplace, one of five in rooms throughout the house. They provide their main source of heat and turn them on only when they spend time in those rooms.

They also made “green” plans to cool the house, especially when the morning sun pours into the living room on hot summer mornings. They installed exterior “European Rolling Shutters” that not only descend at the push of a button, but flap shut.

The laundry room doubles as a kitchenette for the downstairs master bedroom. Except for towels, they hang up all their clothes to line dry across the long back wall. A heated counter top for folding dries the moisture from the air.

They installed a sauna in the master bath and curbless showers for the day when they might need wheelchairs themselves. The house has won several awards for universal and green design, including most recently the National Contractor of the Year Award from the National Remodelers Association (NARI) for Residential Universal Design.

This house, Harrell and Benson say, is their “forever house.”

When they completed the remodel last summer, including the ramp and elevator, Benson’s mother and her friends from the senior home returned for a “wrap” party. They all easily navigated the space.

(Photographs by Bill Enos. Harrell and Benson portrait by Desiree Northend.)

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Update:

This post is featured in the San Jose Mercury News Home and Garden section here.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

From the steep driveway, Lisa Rissetto’s home on a Woodside hilltop looks like an unassuming California ranch style spread, with a curving driveway and a taupe facade. But the inside is a surprising mid-century modern masterpiece.

The same is true at her design studio in San Francisco, where she worked her way up from merchandizing at Esprit de Corps in the 1980s to become president of her own leather handbag and accessory business. Outside, the three-story cement building is plain and austere. But inside is something else entirely — a vibrant, light-filled work space that has such a cool vibe and views of the bay that it’s been used for advertising photo shoots.

If design is a sensibility, perhaps it is no wonder that Lisa has surrounded herself with some of the best of it at her office in town and her home in the country.

Growing up in Bergen County, New Jersey, in the 1960s and ’70s, her influences were strong and clear. Her father was an architect and professor at Columbia University in New York and designed the family’s modern home that neighbors called “The Jetsons’ House” after the space-age cartoon family. Her mother was a style maven, uninhibited to wear a Bonnie Cashin-designed bright orange leather coat with brass toggles.

“That’s all I ever knew,” said Lisa, now 49. “It was different from what everyone else grew up with.” (There were no La-Z-Boy recliners with upholstered American eagles at her house.)

And it’s probably fair to say her home she shares with her husband and three children doesn’t quite conform to those of her neighbors in the horse country of Woodside. Sure, she has an acre, two horses and a rustic old barn that would be an ideal setting for a Ralph Lauren brochure.

But this is a woman who knows a Mies van der Rohe, Jean Prouve and Serge Mouille when she sees it. And a walk through her front door proves it. When she and her husband bought the house in 1995, they quickly tore down the interior walls of the main rooms to open up the floor plan, pulling in light from the back wall of windows deep into the dining and living rooms.

Once inside, you are greeted with a gallery-like space that’s spare and sleek, with pops of lime green and zebra. An extremely rare spider-like industrial lamp by Mouille, who was a mid-century French goldsmith and industrial designer, hangs like a mobile over the dining room table. The table chairs are Aalto, covered in vintage green linen.

In the living room, a low-slung avocado couch and oblong coffee table were designed by T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, a British-born architect and furniture designer who worked in the United States from the 1930s through the ’50s. Lisa acquired three of Van de Rohe’s famous leather Barcelona chairs at auction in Chicago — two a matched pair from the 1960s and the third produced in 1970. A slatted bench in the living room and a bubble lamp over the kitchen table are both classics by George Nelson. Some of her favorites, though, are pieces from the house she grew up in, including the bright red Bertoia chair in the corner.

Bringing depth and personality into the modern space, Lisa’s collection of female portraits picked up at flea markets from Paris to Alameda rest atop a wall unit she had manufactured in the wood-and-metal industrial style of Prouve.

Her sense of style extends up Highway 280 to Bryant Street in San Francisco, where the interior of the concrete building is illuminated by a wall of industrial windows. More than a dozen designers sketching spring fashions and mulling over leather samples and metal buckles collaborate in the bright natural light.

It’s a business she helped build with former Esprit executive George Hensler, who started the company that designs and manufactures accessories for major retailers. When he retired in 2004 and Lisa took over, she fulfilled her dream of designing her own line of handbags. Her company still bears the G.Hensler name, but she labeled the California-casual line of supple Italian leather bags “49 Sq.Mi.,” an ode to the geography of San Francisco.

And while many are in the versatile blacks and browns and burgundies, some of her favorites are in the color of her mother — the bright oranges, soft yellows and rich greens.

When her mother died, Lisa went through her closet and found 12 leather coats — all Bonnie Cashin originals. She reconditioned the leather, and still wears the bright orange one with brass toggles. And it looks fabulous with a sumptuous “49 Sq.Mi.” bag slung over the shoulder.

Like her mother before her, she wears it well.

Update:

This post is featured in the San Jose Mercury News Home and Garden section here.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

List Price: $2,995,000

Open House:

Sun     11/30     1:30-4:30

Bedroom: 4     Bathroom: 3     Sq. Ft: 2,800

Description: Beautiful western hills view from large picture window. Updated single level ranch style home. Secluded location at the end of a private driveway, yet close to town.

Agent: Lyn Jason Cobb
Company: Coldwell banker-menlo park-el camino
Phone: 650-566-5331
Email: lynjason.cobb@cbnorcal.com

Address: 285 Laning Dr.
Woodside, CA 94062

When Judy Cottingham Sieber walked up the driveway of the old English Tudor along the edge of Woodside Road, her heart sank. Hiding behind the tall privet hedge stood a little white cottage with a brick stoop and a wood-shingled roof with moss growing on it _ just the kind of house Judy imagined would be her own one day.

But this was a garage sale, not a house for sale.

“I turned around and walked away,” Judy said. “It’s the only garage sale I’ve ever walked away from.”

Another moment in the driveway and she knew she would fall in love. She couldn’t bare it. She had been heartbroken once already when she and her husband, Mike, were outbid on a historic gatehouse nearby. They had been renting in Woodside for seven years, watching as charming cottages were scraped for mansions.

“I was getting the feeling that by the time I could catch up to the market, they’d all be gone,” said Judy, who grew up in Willow Glen. And this little old house “was too perfect for me.”

When she got word that it was for sale, “I was cooked.”

She had always wanted a “grandmother’s house” that would smell of antiques and perfume. The owner was an elderly antique dealer and her husband was an artist who made bird houses.

The Siebers made an offer. “I put the little Christmas card of the boys in it and wrote, “We need a home,”’ she said. “I pulled out all the stops.”

In 2001, the house built in 1906 became theirs. It was just 1,600 square feet for this family of four, with two bedrooms, slanting floors and Formica kitchen counters. A perfect candidate for a major remodel and addition? Absolutely not.

This is a century-old house whose charm and history have been respected and embraced _ and cleaned up a little. Wall-to-wall white carpeting was stripped back to reveal nothing more than a fir subfloor, which they simply stained. The white flocked wallpaper in the entryhall was removed, and everything was painted. She even resisted replacing her old Wedgewood wall ovens until they burned all her pies one Thanksgiving.

In 2004, Judy purchased a home and garden shop down the street from her house in Woodside village, across from Robert’s Market and a few doors down from Buck’s Restaurant. She changed the name of the shop from “In Any Event” to “Emily Joubert,” the name of her late grandmother who “always found beauty in the simplest things.”

The shop is a showplace for fine design and luxurious decor. One of her customers, who passed Judy’s home every day, remarked, “I would die to see the inside of your house.”

The funny thing, Judy said, is that “I don’t think it’s anything anyone would expect” for the owner of a chic shop.

“I’ve got my grandma’s sofa_ the springs probably poke up when you sit there. I can’t bring myself to get rid of it. The table in the TV room, I remember my grandparents taught us to play dominos on it.”

Those furnishings “might not be out of a magazine, but they speak to me on a different level.”

But don’t get her wrong. The home is layered with sleek linens and seagrass and pieces collected over time by a woman with a fine eye for beauty, quality and style. She has been influenced by her grandmother, who was a regular at Butterfields auctions, and her mother, Ann Cottingham, who co-founded the St. Christopher’s Antique Show in Willow Glen in the 1970s.

In the master bedroom, Judy has a Biedermeier dresser that she bought in Hungary, where she and her husband, a businessman who opened a textile and apparel mill,  lived in the early 1990s. When her oldest son, Jack, was just a toddler, they would drive around the countryside in their ragtop Land Rover searching for flea markets and treasures. They arrived in Budapest with four dufflebags, she said, and returned home with a 40-foot container.

She collects ribbed match strikes, antique pottery and vintage oil paintings. She keeps her extra fabrics in an antique basket with a leather lid.

Still, she left room for her husband’s special things. Mike hunts with a bow and arrow and his record-setting moose antlers hang over the living room mantel. (“It practically impales you every time you stoke the fire,” she said.)

But the antlers are part of his experience, just like the domino table and match strikes are hers. “He is the hunter,” she said. “I’m the gatherer.”

She splurged on a Bertazzoni oven that her son caught her polishing with her apron. “Mom,” he said, “you’re acting like a guy with a car.”

As small as this house is, the ample brick courtyard and terraced backyard gardens make up the difference. Mike raises bees in the back that polinate the apple trees and roses and vegetables. Their harvests are abundant, and the two boys _ now 7 and 16 _ set up a stand on the edge of Woodside Road to sell the bounty.

This little house by the side of the road has become her own. And while it may not be a grandmother’s house anymore, it has the scent of antiques and honey.

Note:  This post is featured in the San Jose Mercury News Home and Garden section here.

Here’s the complete slideshow:

When the days are clear and sunny and the nights are crisp, you know what’s coming next — fall colors. The leaves haven’t quite turned yet in Silicon Valley but you can get a jump on the change of season at Emily Joubert in Woodside.  About a half mile off 280 on Woodside Road, this enchanting boutique is decked out in fall splendor. 

Could your Thanksgiving table could use a little something? Is your Fall decor needing a boost? Emily Joubert can help you out. Vignettes are abundant and can only be classified as eye candy for a Lookiloo.  Terra cotta pumpkins will set you back about $75 for a large and $22.50 for a small. Wonderful fall leaf dishes go for $14.50 or pick up the ones with ruffled edges for $39. Perfectly shaped topiaries and succulents are waiting for a place in your home. Wicker baskets, gourds and candles would make a wonderful center piece on any holiday table. You can also find pumpkins on the vine, which add a warm and homey feel to any front porch transformation.

The store is located at 3036 Woodside Road in Woodside, right across from Robert’s Market.

Note:  This post is featured in the San Jose Mercury News Home and Garden section here.

Lookiloos met up with staging guru Sylvia D’Anna owner of Staging Artists and learned that there is more to staging than meets the eye.   Check out the before and after pics on their site.

Q. Why is staging so important?

A. In today’s competitive real estate market, …

… which strongly favors buyers, staging has become a necessity for selling a home quickly and for top dollar. For a property to stand out and win the hearts and minds of buyers, it needs to look its best.

The rise of online virtual tours makes staging all the more important. If potential buyers aren’t impressed by what they see online, they are likely not to visit the property at all.

Q. Should all homes be staged?

A. In the case of unoccupied homes, which are unfurnished or only partially furnished, the answer is absolutely yes. Most fully furnished and occupied homes also need staging, although the extent of the needed re-design will vary from one property to another.  I haven’t encountered one yet that couldn’t benefit from the recommendations of an experienced stager.

Q. How do you choose the style for each home?

A. Several factors contribute to this decision, including the architectural style of the home, the fixtures installed in the home, and the demographics of prospective buyers. For example, a contemporary look may work well in a stylish townhouse but not in a Mediterranean style villa. Here’s where the judgment and resources of a proven, experienced stager become critical.

Q. Do certain colors work for staging?

A. If applied wisely, colors can be very important. Garish or eccentric colors for walls, rugs and window treatments may need to be replaced. While neutral colors work well in these areas, accents of bright colors such as red or teal can add "pop" that impresses in-person buyers and stands out in Internet photos.

Q. What was your most elaborate staging project?

A. When you’ve staged hundreds of homes, as we have, many different projects come to mind. They include a medical office being converted to family home, special suites for testing home video conferencing products at Cisco Systems, and several estates of 10,000 square feet or more that listed for upward of $6 million dollars.

Q. With all the homes you stage, how do you keep each one looking unique?

A. Every home is indeed unique and requires its own solution. We maintain a large inventory consisting of thousands of items of furniture and accessories, and for some clients we will customize artwork. An effective stager will always find the best solution that fits the home—not a cookie cutter solution that fits the limited inventory or budget of the stager.

I’m constantly up and down the peninsula and today I popped in at a new spot for me—Emily Joubert at 3036 Woodside Rd. in Woodside.  I knew I had stumbled onto something incredible as soon as the succulent table greeted me. This place was amazing.  My head was spinning…where to look first!   

There is an outdoor garden section with wonderful garden art in every corner and exotic looking plants filling in all the nooks and crannies.  The inside shop had great luxurious finds.  I spotted a set of salt and peppershakers. They are a cobalt blue glass with a wonderful silver sleeve. These shakers have a Moroccan feel and make a great housewarming gift for my cousin who just bought her first home.

This is the kind of place you stop to pick up that fabulous gift, because you know they will have that ultimate unforgettable item.  Plus they have fresh flowers.  So if you’re in the neighborhood or even if your not, stop in.  You won’t be disappointed.

Updated: This post is featured in the San Jose Mercury News Home and Garden section here.