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‘A Sculpture You Can Live In’: M Woodside Home of IDEO Founder

What do you get when you mix an innovator from Silicon Valley with an Italian avant-garde designer and architect? This very unconventional home in Woodside, CA, now on the market for $15 million.

Designed in 2000, the 8,250-square-foot abode was dreamed up by Ettore Sottsass, who founded the postmodernist Memphis Group. Sottsass was known for his eclectic taste and whimsical industrial designs, including the iconic red typewriter for Olivetti. He died in 2007 at the age of 90.

A couple of decades ago, he was commissioned to design a home for the founder of the groundbreaking IDEO group, David Kelley. IDEO is a San Francisco Bay Area design consultancy with clients all over the world—including some of the world’s leading brands.

The duo had collaborated together before, on the “Enorme” phone in 1986, which Sottsass designed and Kelley’s group engineered. Let’s just say, the iPhone it wasn’t.

“The funny thing was it was a total failure. No one bought it except for museums,” says listing agent Michael Dreyfus. 

The duo achieved more success when it came to housing. Kelley’s house comes across as a bold design experiment, with turquoise walls, mismatched exterior cladding, and odd placement of built-in furniture that goes against the conventional.

“There’s a lot of playfulness in the house,” Dreyfus says. “It’s designed to make you think.”

He points out that as you walk through the rooms, you notice “bookcases that don’t line up, fireplaces facing the wrong way.” These are intentional design tweaks.

“It creates a kind of energy. That’s what he intended to do,” Dreyfus says. “At the same time, it’s a lovely house to live in.”

The lovely house comes with a kitchen, family room, dining room, office, and master bedroom, which all open to outdoor patios and a pool. But each of these standard rooms comes with nonstandard design choices such as mismatched cupboards placed on angle to separate the family room from the dining area.

The office has a domed turquoise ceiling and built-in shelves. And the master suite has a bed frame centered in the middle of the room, rather than against a wall, with a fireplace angled toward it.

“It’s classic but it’s completely unclassic,” the agent says. The goal, he says, was to be “unordinary.”

The property includes horse stables. While no horses are currently on the property, Kelley used the space for a vintage car collection and workshop.

A professor at Stanford University, Kelley, who founded the design school, has opted to move closer to campus. He’s leaving behind the built-in furniture Sottsass designed for the home. It was constructed in Italy and shipped to Woodside, a tony town in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 “The house is like a giant work of art,” Dreyfus says. “It’s a sculpture you can live in.”

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