Pride Month Profile: Designer Robert Hutchinson
Interior Designer Robert Hutchinson, Date and Photographer unknown
In June, we celebrate Pride Month for the LGBTQ+ community, and COUPAR profiles San Francisco interior designer Robert Hutchinson (1937–2008). Known by the moniker of Hutch, the Louisiana native left the South for the Bay Area in 1955. San Francisco's gay and lesbian community had already started to establish itself as a visible force. Hutch was out and proud, studying at Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design, where he learned color theory and Asian aesthetics. During his lifetime, his interiors contributed to the "California Look" but were unique due to his penchant for bespoke architecture and furnishings punctuated with tribal antiquities.
Interior Design: Robert Hutchinson, Photography: John Vaughan, Architectural Digest, 1987
Of his many projects that graced Architectural Digest's pages was Hutch's own home at 1232 Sutter Street. He purchased the two-story commercial building, built in 1911, and transformed its exterior in the 1970s. The sculptural façade covered in earth-colored plaster resembles the Guerrero stone masks he collected. Hutch designated the ground floor for business and the second level apartment for living. On the interiors, he took two years to achieve the look of glazed adobe for the walls. Against that backdrop, the rooms took on an almost Jungian quality, displaying Hutch's array of ancient art and natural objects.
Interior Design: Robert Hutchinson, Photography: John Vaughan, Architectural Digest, 1987
Hutch often entertained friends at his home on Sutter Street or his ranch in Armstrong Woods Forest. He would frequently tell stories of growing up in rural Baptist Denham Springs, Louisiana, and hitchhiking to bohemian San Francisco at the age of eighteen. Or more colorful stories like when, in 1967, police arrested Dame Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, and Hutch at a pot party in Haight-Ashbury. They shared a cell and remained friends. Hutch sometimes lamented that he had not attained the success of his contemporary Michael Taylor, but he left behind a legacy of bold, uncompromising design.
