San Francisco’s colourful properties had been as soon as painted grey

San Francisco is perhaps best known for two things: its infamous dripping fog and colorful houses painted in all shades from daring to pastel hues of the rainbow.

Today, San Francisco’s Victorian and other colorful homes face an increasing threat: the popularity of gray, a trend that threatens to inundate the city’s unique architectural heritage.

But before we go gray, our story begins in the late 19th century, when colorful, sumptuous, ornate Victorian houses were still popping up all over town.

The vast majority of Victorian homes were built between 1870 and 1905, many by large construction companies, some of which were on loan to potential home buyers, according to Tanu Sankalia, a professor of architecture and urban studies at the University of San Francisco. Many of these builders marketed their houses to the city’s rising middle class. While the rich lived on Nob Hill and Pacific Heights as they do today, everything west of Van Ness Street, including Western Addition, attracted people with more modest needs.

One of these builders was John C. Pelton, who began building Petons Cheap Dwellings across the city in the 1880s. According to the book “In the Victorian Style” by Randolph Delehanty and Richard Sexton, the houses could be built for as little as $ 585. About $ 130 went to the “carpenter, work, and nails.”

Pelton had three versions of apartments, delimited by the numbers one through three. Dwelling One was a three-room cottage that cost just under $ 600. Apartment Two was $ 854.25 while the more highly decorated Apartment Three was $ 1,140.

Houses were built quickly, but some had an overarching problem: They looked too similar. To differentiate between the houses, color came into play.

“This is one of the first cases where colors show up,” said Sankalia. “Because they were so similar, the question was how do you tell them apart?”

According to Delehanty and Sexton, the original Victorian paint scheme was “pretty simple”. The Victorians have not yet experienced a color boom.

“White lead paint was used on the body of the building and all of its ornaments, no matter how elaborate,” they write. Other colors like black, green, and even terracotta would have been used solely for the window sash.

And now back to gray. According to the authors, even this dark hue was “another preferred exterior color of the San Francisco Victorian style,” while the “richer colors” were reserved for the interiors of the houses.

But that wasn’t necessarily the case with all Victorians. In the book “Painted Ladies: San Francisco’s Resplendent Victorians”, authors Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen explain that “painters in the latter half of the [the 19th century] uses different colors to highlight the different parts of the house. ”

“Some houses looked like they were painted in stripes: the first floor should be one color; the second story is a different one; trim, another; Roof, another; and so on, ”write the authors.

At the end of the 19th century, Victorians were reluctant to go out of style.

“In the 1920s, the word ‘Victorian’ was a term of contempt,” write Delehanty and Sexton. “Victorians were seen as ‘monstrosities’.”

But changes in the city were brewing. During the war, “there was a strange shift,” said Sankulia. “There was a lot of excess navy gray paint – battleship gray – going around,” he said, and the brightly colored Victorians and row houses began to turn solid.

“There was the Great Depression, the wartime austerity measures, and there was already a supply of excess inventory,” said Sankulia. “So it became the choice of color.”

Over the years, San Francisco’s old homes, especially the scolded Victorians, fell into disuse and deteriorated. The paint was peeling off, the bars cracked, the windows shattered and more and more people moved into the chic high-rise buildings around the city center.

But change is brewing again. By the mid-1970s, San Francisco property prices had more than doubled on a now familiar topic, such as “Victorian Style.” People started paying attention to the faded Victorians again, shifting their focus to restoring them rather than building new houses.

“Another part of that process was the migration of young gay men to San Francisco,” write Delehanty and Sexton. “They found that they could make a living buying Victorians, restoring, and then selling them, only to buy another house to save to keep the process going.”

At the same time, the colorist movement overtook San Francisco and its mundane Victorians. The colorist movement was led by a group of artists who carried their love for the psychedelic movement into their homes.

One such artist was Maija Peeples-Bright, who, according to SF Heritage, painted an ornate Victorian townhouse at 908 Steiner St. in a rainbow of bright colors.

“Maija and I are very beige,” SF Heritage quotes Peeples-Bright’s husband. “She has dedicated her life to painting luminous animals, all different and unique, on every handy surface. … Beige has no chance against them. ”

Other artists and colorists, including Butch Kardum and Bob Buckter, joined the trend.

Buckter, who previously spoke to SFGATE, introduced the new colorful trend to the psychedelic movement.

“[The psychedelic movement] changes the way you perceive things and how you want your home to look, ”he said. “I think that’s how it started. And then a few pioneers like me started going out and putting things together. And then people started taking note of it, and then more and more people did it, and then it just grew. “

But there is more to it than trends. According to Sankulia, new colors with lighter shades were also developed in the 1960s. Color also served as a visual sign of the resurrection.

“You could revive some of these buildings with paint,” he said. “It’s a different way of saying, these are really cool buildings, it’s also a way of getting listed.”

Sankulia argued that in the context of urban renewal, “monument protection was given an additional urgency”.

“Color became another way of preserving these houses and making people aware that this is a built environment with architectural heritage and that the heritage of the city should be preserved,” he said. “What better way to do that than to celebrate it with color?”

Now that we know the houses in San Francisco to be colorful, their bright colors have become a part of this city and its history. The preservation of the houses – and their colors – is a reminder of this.

But back to the gray tones. Buckter said he thinks the latest desire to paint San Francisco’s once-vibrant homes gray is just a trend.

“It ignores or ignores your architecture,” he said. “But you know what? It’s a free world, and if you like it, do it.”