The organizers of the San Francisco Decorator Showcase asked Sean to design a bedroom for an 11-year-old child. “Is it a boy, or is it a girl?” Leffers remembers wondering. “And then, I realized that really shouldn’t be my first question about a child.”

Instead, Leffers challenged himself to design a room that was ungendered, and he began looking for a palette that would suit that purpose. He found it right outside the house used for the Showcase, near the Presidio, where trees created a color scheme of chartreuses and mossy greens.

Using those hues as highlights against a neutral backdrop, he created areas for sleeping, playing and doing homework — selecting a LES ARC STOOL by CHARLOTTE PERRIAND from HEP GALERIE, woven folding chairs from ELLEN WARD SCARBOROUGH ANTIQUES and a VERNER PANTON CONE CHAIR. But on the whole, he kept things spare. What he provided was, literally, room to grow.

Leffers, himself the father of two, says he got “a lot of pleasure” from “recognizing the space that we need to give people, especially children, around gender expression, and being able to render that in our design aesthetic.”

FRED BERNSTEIN for INTROSPECTIVE