OUR FOUNDATION
It began with family.
Shawback Realty Office 1958
Redwood City, California
Shawback Studio was founded as Shawback Design by Penny Shawback in 1981, but its roots reach further back.
Penny grew up in Redwood City, California, surrounded by the worlds of real estate, construction, and design. Her father, Charlie Shawback, ran a real estate company, introducing her early to the relationship between property, place, and possibility. Her brother George Shawback also carried on the tradition through the Real Estate brokerage. Her mother, Mary, brought creativity to those spaces in a way that left an equally lasting impression.
When decorating Charlie’s circa-1958 office, Mary upholstered the desks herself and transformed a blank wall into a window, painting a landscape and framing it with shutters. It was an early lesson in something that would come to define Penny’s own approach to design: a space could be practical and imaginative, considered and deeply personal, all at once.
OUR FOUNDER
Penny’s Story
Penny Shawback has spent a lifetime paying attention to spaces.
Her study of architecture and art developed into a deep understanding of interior design and, over time, a particular fascination with the relationship between how a space looks, how it functions, and how it makes us feel.
When Penny founded Shawback Design in 1981, she built the practice around that understanding.
For her, the best projects have never been about interiors in isolation. They emerge when architecture, landscape, material, and lifestyle are considered together, each informing the other to create a place that feels complete.
That philosophy led Penny to work closely with architects, builders, craftspeople, artists, and landscape designers, often becoming involved well before the interiors themselves took shape. It also led to something even more meaningful: relationships with clients that extended far beyond a single project.
Over four decades, Penny has worked with families across homes, generations, states, and stages of life. Many returned for a second project, then a third. In the process, clients became lifelong relationships, and the studio grew alongside them.
For Penny, that trust remains one of the greatest privileges of the work.
Designed to endure.
OUR LEGACY
Across residential and hospitality projects, Shawback Studio has always approached design as something deeply personal.
The studio listens before it draws. It considers how people move through a space, how they gather, retreat, celebrate, and live. It works alongside clients from the earliest conversations and, when called for, from the search for land and selection of architectural partners through construction, interiors, installation, and the final reveal.
This continuity allows each decision to become part of a larger whole. The result is not a prescribed aesthetic, but a place shaped around the people who will inhabit it.
More than forty years later, the principle remains remarkably simple: Design an enduring place. Understand the people within it. Create something worthy of the lives that will unfold there.
The story continues.
OUR EVOLUTION
Over more than four decades, our practice has grown alongside our clients, our collaborators, and the places we have had the privilege to shape.
What began as an interior design practice has evolved naturally into something broader. Through years of working closely with architects, builders, landscape designers, artists, craftspeople, and real estate professionals, we came to understand that the most considered spaces emerge when every discipline is part of the same conversation.
Today, led by Damon and Julie Savoia, the second generation of our family studio, Shawback Studio reflects that evolution.
We work across interior design, architecture, real estate, and hospitality, bringing greater continuity to the process and considering each project as a complete environment rather than a collection of separate parts.
Our evolution from Shawback Design to Shawback Studio is more than a change in name. It is an expression of how we have always worked: collaboratively, holistically, and with an understanding that architecture, interiors, landscape, material, and life are inseparable.
The studio has changed, our foundation has not.
Founded in 1981, meaningfully evolving.