With a maiden name like Dollar and the currency to complement it, the late San Francisco society figure Diana Dollar Knowles was sure to make a few good purchases. And as Christie’s auction entitled “Michael Taylor and The Alchemy of Design: The Diana Dollar Knowles Collection” bears gleaming witness, the vivacious heiress to the now-defunct Dollar shipping line ate, slept, and entertained amid seriously choice goods and chattel.

To conceive the settings of her residences, Knowles selected Michael Taylor (1927–1986), one of America’s top postwar designers. Though Taylor’s taste became increasingly rugged and monumental as time went by, for Knowles and her second husband, banker Gorham Knowles, Taylor delivered crisply modern takes on Bourbon chic (San Francisco) and mountain-lodge luxe (Lake Tahoe). A 1920s mansion boldly remodeled in the 80s and decorated by Taylor, the Knowles’s three-story house at 3725 Washington Street in the Bay City’s Presidio Heights neighborhood—its contents make up most of the 299-lot sale—was expressionistically ancien régime.