Victorian Houses in the Western Addition And Fillmore Neighborhoods of San Francisco

Above: A beautiful American Queen Anne Style home built in 1905 in the Western Addition

On our recent stay in San Francisco I was especially inspired by the Victorian architecture, whose amazing and often very detailed style makes a huge statement in San Francisco. Though I lived in San Francisco for a few years, and have always loved Victorian houses, somehow not having seen them for quite a while led to a greater appreciation than ever. So many wooden details on the facades, so many unique combinations, so many wonderful applications of color, and above all, so many Captain’s Towers, my favorite! While San Francisco has Victorian homes scattered through out, the bulk of the more “modest” and mass produced homes were built in the Western Addition and Fillmore neighborhoods. Additionally while many of the Victorian mansions of Nob Hill were destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, those in the western and southern neighborhoods of the city were generally not affected. Ah yes, and if you think “Victorian” is one style, you are mistaken! It is true, the houses are all made of wood, and generally quite detailed, but there are several major Victorian styles, including Italiante, Stick-Eastlake, Carpenter Gothic and American Queen Anne, which adds even more interest! One of the most famous rows of Victorian homes in San Francisco, the “Painted Ladies” (which I wrote about here) on Alamo square are actually on the simple side compared to the variety that exists. Let’s take a little walk to see some of the delightful homes built between 1849 and 1915, shall we?

Above: The Carpenter Gothic style tower of the Westerfield House on Alamo square.

On my first night in San Francisco, as I combed the neighborhood for a grocery store, I caught site of this Carpenter Gothic tower and wow! It had a strong haunted house profile and was so dramatic size wise. Of course I returned by day to check it out, and you can read more about that here.

Above: A typical Bay Window Italianate style Victorian home in the Western Addition, though more grand than some similar looking and more modest versions, because it is built on a hill, and is free-standing, with a backyard.

The Italianate style was the first national style to have a major effect on San Francisco’s built environment. The Italianate style became a craze in the United States during the 1840s and 1850s, and while it initially was applied to romantic country villas, it gradually filtered down to the middle classes and by the 1860s Italianate row houses were being constructed throughout most American cities, and especially in the booming young city of San Francisco. After arriving in California the Italianate style was changed by necessity, as unlike while in Eastern and Midwestern cities, where the style was typically expressed in stone or brick, in California, there was no access to cut stone or lime, and therefore wood was the major building material. The applied architectural elements fabricated in wood, including the quoins at the corners of the house and over-sized brackets at the eaves, are decorative versions of masonry reinforcements. Signature elements of the Italianate style in San Francisco include bold brackets, false parapet roofs which conceal the gable roof, narrow vertically proportioned windows and doors with projecting bracketed hoods.

The bay-windowed Italianate came about in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Increased land costs shrunk lot sizes to the typical 25′ x 100′ or 25′ x 80′ dimensions, resulting in homes that were typically only two bays in width. The bay windows increased the square footage of each floor and increased the amount of available light. The addition of a bay window also allowed the builder/architect to add more mill work and other facade decoration to an otherwise plain and boxy facade. The bay-windowed Italianate was embraced by San Francisco builders, who constructed dense rows of nearly identical bay-windowed Italianates throughout the Mission, the Western Addition, Pacific Heights and elsewhere. The impact of this variation was so widespread that contemporary observers called San Francisco the “City of Bay Windows.”

Above: A Bay Window Italianate with a square bay window! Hmm, or is this actually Stick-Eastlake style? Maybe both, after all, these houses were constructed a bit like Lego!

Above: Lovely details!

During World War I and World War II, many of the houses were sadly painted battleship gray with war-surplus Navy paint. Another sixteen thousand were demolished, and many others sadly had the Victorian decor stripped off or covered with tar paper, brick, stucco, or aluminum siding. In 1963, San Francisco artist Butch Kardum began combining intense blues and greens on the exterior of his Italianate-style Victorian house. While his house was criticized by some, other neighbors began to copy the bright colors on their own homes. Kardum became a color designer, and he and other artists / colorists such as Tony Canaletich, Bob Buckter, and Jazon Wonders began to transform dozens of gray houses into Painted Ladies. By the 1970s, the colorist movement, as it was called, had changed entire streets and neighborhoods. This process continues to this day, and on my walks around town I saw a frequent use of metallic gold, which is quite lovely.

Above: A home or building with apartments over a store. Even the more “modest” homes were not lacking style!
Above: A Stick-Eastlake Victorian home with bougainvillea, two of my favorite things!

The San Francisco Stick/Eastlake style is an architectural aesthetic that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s in which the structural system was expressed on the exterior by abundant millwork, or “stick-work.” The Stick Style was first major Victorian-era style to discard the architectural elements that mimicked stone, and to embrace an entirely new aesthetic that reflected the underlying balloon-frame construction. The term “Eastlake,” often applied to the style, was a misattribution of this wholly American fad, although architects working in the mode did on occasion take elements from the more Gothic influenced work of its unwilling namesake, British taste-maker Charles Eastlake. The Stick/Eastlake style was given national prominence in industrial and furniture exhibits at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

In San Francisco, the Stick/Eastlake style was primarily an ornamental style applied to the already well-established urban rowhouse prototype. Nearly identical in proportion to the bay-windowed Italianate, the San Francisco, Stick/Eastlake style dwelling was usually two stories and the façade was two bays in width. The façade of the San Francisco Stick/Eastlake style rowhouse is typically dominated by a two-story, rectilinear bay window. The style is primarily distinguished by the enthusiastic application of flat strips of wood around windows and doors and elsewhere to express the underlying structural frame. The ornamental detailing is much more imaginative and non-naturalistic, incorporating so-called “Eastlake” millwork detailing such as sunburst-motif brackets, rosettes, and floral motifs. Most of the exterior detailing was obtained from local mills or ordered from catalogs. The roofline of the San Francisco Stick/Eastlake generally received a great deal of attention, with applied ornamental truss work and false gable roofs. San Francisco Stick/Eastlake style dwellings were constructed in San Francisco between roughly 1880 and 1890. In addition to the Western Additions and Fillmore neighborhoods, homes can also be found in Pacific Heights, Eureka Valley and Noe Valley.

Above: An American Queen Anne style home built in 1905, in the Western Addition

In the United States, “Queen Anne” is used to describe a wide range of picturesque buildings with “free Renaissance” (non-Gothic Revival architecture) details and as an alternative both to the French-derived Second Empire and the less “domestic” Beaux-Arts architecture, is broadly applied to architecture, furniture, and decorative arts of the period 1880 to 1910; some “Queen Anne” architectural elements, such as the wraparound front porch, continued to be found into the 1920s.

Distinctive features of American Queen Anne architecture may include an asymmetrical facade; dominant front-facing gable, often cantilevered out beyond the plane of the wall below; overhanging eaves; round, square, or polygonal tower(s); shaped and Dutch gables; a porch covering part or all of the front facade, including the primary entrance area; a second-story porch or balconies; pedimented porches; differing wall textures, such as patterned wood shingles shaped into varying designs, including resembling fish scales, terra cotta tiles, relief panels, or wooden shingles over brickwork, etc.; dentils; classical columns; spindle work; oriel and bay windows; horizontal bands of leaded windows; monumental chimneys; painted balustrades; and wooden or slate roofs. Front gardens often had wooden fences.

In San Francisco the major challenge was adapting the ideally sprawling Queen Anne dwelling to the standard 25′ wide urban lot. The problem was not longstanding as the serviceable urban rowhouse prototype used for both bay-windowed Italianate and Stick/Eastlake style, was given a new appearance with the construction of full gable-end roofs, turrets, integral balconies and other quintessentially Queen Anne details. The Queen Anne is principally about asymmetry, picturesque massing and a variety of color and materials. Despite the cramped conditions of San Francisco, this was done to good effect, especially on corner lots or double-width 50′ lots, such as San Francisco’s famous Haas-Lilienthal House of 1886 in Pacific Heights. The Queen Anne style in San Francisco also manifested itself in smaller cottages for the working classes and many examples of these can be found in the City’s outlying neighborhoods of Glen Park, Potrero, the Inner Sunset and Glen Park.

Above: Wow, look at those details on this American Queen Anne style home. Most of the homes of this size were subdivided, as while San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the USA, some of the neighborhoods in the city had years in which they were not exactly ‘upscale’.
Above: Look at those spindles! It really is amazing how so many details on the facade have survived.

Above: Look at this Bay Window Italianate beauty. With comparatively minimal detailing on the facade, the color combo and touches of gold are truly stunning! Bay windows, ahhhhh.

Above: Stick-Eastlake homes on Alamo square. The little towers and the possibility of cozy window seats within always gets me! Check out my previous post about Alamo Square here.
Above: While in need of a good cleaning, this facade has a unique combination of fish scale shingles, columns, spindles, and a window shape that is unusual.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little tour of Victorian homes in the Western Addition and Fillmore neighborhoods. If you ever have the chance to be in San Francisco, don’t miss out on the experience, take a walk, and then keep walking, that is where all the beauty of the city lies, namely in its neighborhoods!

If you are looking for a great breakdown of all the major styles seen in the wonderful houses of San Francisco, check out the posts here, and then click on the articles which say style 2 and 3.