Image courtesy of Andreas Strandman / Unsplash

Between the pastel tones and gold leaf decorations, one can see more and more a striking juxtaposition: 125-year-old houses painted in the tones of a nuclear warhead from the Cold War or a dormant cinder cone. In neighborhoods like Mission and Haight, this phenomenon reads for some residents as the eradication of the Latino community or the ongoing counterculture. – The guard

Gentrification has fundamentally changed what New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio once called the “crisis of desirability”.

As in the Big Apple, many high-paid workers have begun to return to their former wasted enclaves, contrary to a trend that initially seemed to shrink the city’s tech population significantly due to the pandemic, leading to even more reluctance among the locals.

“I’m not moving. I’m not going anywhere. I have my roots,” a lifelong resident told the Guardian. “Working with kids, teaching kids music without asking for money. It’s about giving back to the community. Latin- Rock music originated here in the mission district, so my aim is to keep it alive. “

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R.Ichard Segovia’s house is as loud as the Latin rock music he teaches kids in his basement studio. With colors ranging from jungle green and royal blue on the sidewalk to a red and yellow sunburst on the ridge, the otherwise humble Spanish-style house is essentially a giant mural, a crowded portrait of long deceased musicians, Segovia’s family members, social activists, various psychedelics and one or the other jungle animal.

Segovia has lived in the Mission District of San Francisco since 1963 and sees itself as the guardian of the district’s culture, especially as the birthplace of Latin rock. (Carlos Santana, a family friend, grew up nearby.) But increasingly, the 68-year-old “Mayor of the Mission” is faced with a stark display of all the colors that have been bled from the city in successive waves of technology-driven ones Gentrification.

“I walk through the neighborhood every day and see all these gray houses,” says Segovia. “It’s like a cemetery.”

From the International Orange of the Golden Gate Bridge to the intricately carved and painted facades of the Painted Ladies in Alamo Square, vivid colors have long been the grammar of San Francisco’s native architecture.

Richard Segovia stands in front of his brightly painted house in San Francisco. The house next to his is painted gray. Photo: Talia Herman / The Guardian

But between the pastel tones and the gold leaf decorations you can see more and more a conspicuous juxtaposition: 125-year-old houses painted in the tones of a nuclear warhead from the Cold War or a dormant cinder cone. In neighborhoods like Mission and Haight, this phenomenon reads for some residents as the eradication of the Latino community or the ongoing counterculture. Gentrification gray houses have become a totem of wealthy intruders. The rush of wealth to central cities is global in scope, but its impact has been particularly pronounced in San Francisco – all the more as the city is known to value its own uniqueness.

Some of these homes have accents of black or darker gray. Some are just the color of a stranded humpback whale. Many have the crispy oxidized planters full of succulents or geometrically austere horsetail plants straight from a dwell magazine page, while others feature brightly painted doors in the same off-neon palette as athleisure clothing.

To their proponents, they’re sleek and contemporary, with paintwork that can take a punch without ever looking dirty. To their critics, they’re unimaginative, historically inaccurate deviations that a wealthy biotech CEO who wears a gray Patagonia fleece vest every day will appreciate – or worse, real estate agents are pushing to add some appeal to a potential investment property in the country nobody is allowed to live.

“I had some concerns about painting our house gray, even though it’s a symbol of gentrification in the Mission,” says Kate Shaw, who lives with partner Dav Rausch in a Mission Victorian they bought in 2012. But the couple, a professional designer and a designer by Hobby, say gray was a “jumping off point” in “reinventing” the “shape” of their pre-1900 home.

A calendar shows a home with a color scheme on historic buildings in the Bay Area designed by Bob Buckter, an independent color consultant. Photo: Talia Herman / The Guardian

“Going towards monochrome might be interpreted as lazy, but getting those colors right is his own business. It’s an art in itself, ”she said of Facetime during a tour. “Color emphasizes the shape and not the other way around.”

“We hired a Latino crew led by a Latino who was laid off from my company,” added Shaw. “People said, ‘Hire him! He’s great and we want to make sure he’s looked after and cared for. ‘ His crew said, ‘We’re used to so much more color and we love that!’ They placed it at the top of their website as what they were most proud of. “

The notion that Victorian houses were traditionally polychromatic is as much a myth as is our contemporary notion of ancient Roman cities like Bone White. As a form of civic improvement, Roman buildings were brashly – garishly decorated by most modern standards – while San Francisco’s Victorians were likely relatively drab when first built.

“When these Victorians started they didn’t have that many color options – usually white or gray, lead-colored. You didn’t pick out the moldings, ”says architect David Baker, who lives in a gray house himself. “I think we shouldn’t take it seriously – it’s just color.”

But for Bob Buckter, known as Dr. Color, it is anything but just color. He has worked as an independent color consultant on historic buildings in the Bay Area for more than 50 years – around 18,500 by his count.

“I talk to people, find out what their taste is, what they like, what they don’t like, whether they are wild or conservative, whether they like dark blue or dark gray or polychrome, how they are dressed, how they design their interiors” he says in his gray-purple office with aubergine-colored curtains and hand-painted ceiling medallions.

Many Buckter customers return for a second or third treatment – in some cases a fourth. He takes a straightforward approach of giving the customer what he wants and tries not to impose his own taste on people. But the usual result is a uniquely harmonious mixture of colors, so that a monochrome, matte exterior appears contradicting his practice. Is it simply a taste preference or the mutilation of an irreplaceable treasure from an old sequoia tree?

“All of that. I’ve spent my life taking care of the architectural details of historic houses and other architectural things, and I want to find out the purpose that they let me in and make color. Whether the market is selling the building or Proud of ownership, I have to take care of all of that in my design, “says Buckter, who thinks I’ve done something.”

After consulting with so many homes and getting enough attention that his work has resulted in copycat jobs, it’s likely that Buckter shifted collective tastes in a certain direction. Consequently, the rise of the gray Victorian could be a reaction against his aesthetic.

Bob Buckter, known as Dr. Color, has consulted on nearly 18,500 historic buildings in the Bay Area – including his own home in the Mission. Photo: Talia Herman / The Guardian

“That can be part of it,” says Buckter. “I think the main reason is a trend towards simplicity and modernity. They are fed up with the polychrome look, some of these people. This trend has been noticed by others and some people just ride the wave of this trend. “

The lack of color annoys some longtime residents whose love for the sedate San Francisco homes has never diminished.

“I wish they’d make me the color officer for San Francisco so that people would check with me what colors they were using,” says artist and photographer Liz Mamorsky. “Some people try to do something good and restore a Victorian style, but they don’t quite get the colors right. You want that retinal flash that you get by having two complements of the same shade. “

Fred Messbarger, a 15-year-old homeowner in Mission, calls the gray trend “heartbreaking,” saying that the “beauty of San Francisco resides in the Victorians and Edwardians, and the contrast of the houses and the curves and the details – and that too.” Neighbors”. . One house could have completely different colors than the others. “

Messbarger had his Italian house repainted in turquoise, navy blue and white around 1870, with gold details and a neon green door. Everyone in the family had input and the response was positive.

“When I work outside in the garden or even leave the house, I keep getting comments and compliments,” says Messbarger. “It’s nice to hear because it took us five years to decide what to paint.”

“I didn’t think we were brave,” he adds. “I just thought we were bringing back color. The door is bold, but that’s our son’s fault. “

But sometimes gray is what happens when a diverse group tries to make a decision.

Eric Carlson owns a condominium in a four-story building that is home to a Latino family, a Greco-American family, and another single man. When it came time to repaint the “deep pale pink with white moldings” on the exterior, these very different people found it difficult to come to an agreement. After six weeks of looking at Swatches, everyone made lists of their top 4 and their two “absolutely not”. The result? Homburg Gray, with parchment white trim.

“I would have been fine with a much more expressive color,” says Carlson. “I was also aware that this had to be a consensus and that these were acceptable colors. Do i love her No. But does it look a lot better than what we had before? By and large, life is about compromise. I knew that by the early 20s there would be no appetite for a historically accurate color. “

If nobody really loves it, then why does gray seem to dominate?

“I think we’re in a strange place where this slate gray looks like a popular color and so is self-reinforcing,” says Carlson. “We are used to this dull palette of modern architecture, and it is boring. We are not exactly in the Baroque era of architecture. “

For some brokers, a dull tungsten gray coat can do more than just dampen the look. When a luxury real estate company bought the house next to Segovia and painted it gray, Segovia tried to put down the real estate agent and tell him that whoever bought the house would have a rock musician as a neighbor.

Cousins ​​Maggie Guillen, 12, left, and Noe Zuleta, 14, sit on the front steps of their home in the Mission District. Photo: Talia Herman / The Guardian

“He wouldn’t pay any attention to me. So I said, ‘I’m going to take revenge on these fools.’ ”Segovia put his speaker system against the wall and slammed Metallica during the open house.

Eventually, the real estate company spent $ 40,000 to soundproof Segovia’s home studio so they could offload their property – to people who paid $ 750,000 and then four years later for $ 1.7 million to the current owner sold.

Segovia has been offered $ 2.5 million in cash for his home so many times that he threatened an aggressive agent with legal action.

“I’m not moving. I’m not going anywhere. I have my roots,” he says. “Working with kids, teaching kids music without asking for money. It’s about giving back to the community. Latin rock music is Made here in the mission district, so my aim is to keep that alive. “

As for the ongoing cruelty, “There should be a law,” says Segovia. “Enough is enough. For me they are prison colors.”

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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.”

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