One of many Bay Space’s richest residents purchased a fixer-upper. However neighbors say it does not want fixing

The Petaluma fixer-upper bought by one of the wealthiest men in the Bay Area doesn’t really need fixing up, some of his new neighbors say.

Not if it means letting 80 dump trucks haul away 10,000 cubic feet of dirt for the next year or so to allow the home to double in size and to enable construction of a 4,200-square-foot underground garage and basement, two large walk-in closets and a dining room that can seat 25 guests.

The historic 115-year-old house on Sixth Street, just south of downtown, was bought four years ago by Peter Haas Jr., an heir to the Levi Strauss pants empire, and his wife, Ginnie. Nipping and tucking may run in the family genes, but the alterations to the property have got some of his neighbors feeling bluer than a pair of the family’s iconic trousers.

“We worked hard to come up with a plan to bring a historic house back to its glory,” Haas said. “We want to live in it for the rest of our lives. Petaluma is such a vibrant, thriving community.”

“This project proposes a complete transformation of the original structure to suit the extravagant desires of its new owners,” said Elsa Beatty of Preserve Petaluma, a group opposing the plan.

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Posters and flyers proclaiming “Stop the Big Dig” are popping up all over town, in advance of a Dec. 21 meeting of the City Council. There the plan — already approved by planners and the city’s historical preservation committee — faces a final vote.

A peek at the blueprints filed with the city shows the ambitious changes Haas has in mind for the elegant gray two-story Victorian designed more than a century ago by legendary Petaluma architect Brainerd Jones.

Gone will be four of the home’s six bedrooms. Scheduled for demolition are fireplaces, balustrades, roofs, staircases, a chimney and a dormer roof window.

In their place are to be a pair of 10-foot-by-10-foot closets (labeled “Pete’s closet” and “Ginnie’s closet”), a 25-seat dining room, an 11-seat breakfast room, an elevator, a wine cellar, a mudroom, a powder room, a barbecue porch with two grills and a turntable to enable four cars to maneuver into the new basement parking garage.

A proposed top-floor deck that will replace the dormer will offer “unimpeded views into at least six neighboring backyards,” complained Preserve Petaluma on its website.

Haas, 73, grandson of the late Levi Strauss president Walter A. Haas and himself a former president of the company, said he worked closely with his architects and with the city on his plans and cannot understand the controversy.

“Most people look at this and say they support it, or they say what’s the big deal,” he said. ”I understand that a neighbor wouldn’t be happy with construction going on next to his house for a period of time. But when it’s done, it will be consistent with the look and feel of the neighborhood. If you stood in the street, you wouldn’t see anything different.”

Bill Wolpert, the project’s architect, said he suspected that opposition to the renovations, which mystified him, was driven by fears that the house will be “some sort of corporate entertainment house — and it’s not.”

He has already altered his blueprints, he said, to accommodate critics who objected to the sunroom and to the proximity of the barbecue grills to the neighbors’ property.

The renovations, he said, would cost “over $1 million, which is not really a lot of money for a project with this much work.” And he said he knew of no rules against big dining rooms or big closets, if that’s what the client asks for.

In a statement, Preserve Petaluma maintained that the preservation committee and city planning department showed a “complete lack of support for historic and cultural preservation” in approving the Haas plans, which, it said, would “essentially gut and forever change the character of this home and surrounding environment.”

Preserve Petaluma founder Margie Turrel, who is also the Haases’ next-door neighbor, said she and others started the group in July after she and Peter Haas differed over his plan for the barbecue deck that directly adjoined her property.

“I believed smoke and odors would permeate from the cooking area,” she said. “I asked him politely if he would move it and he unpolitely said he would not.”

Turrel added that the plans for the barbecue deck called for it to be raised 5 feet off the ground. That meant, she said, that the feet of the Haases and their guests would be directly opposite the heads of the Turrels on the other side of the fence.

Turrel said she “welcomed the Haases as neighbors,” but believes the size and scope of the renovations are “out of scale with adjacent homes.”

Neighbors seemed divided about whether to let the pants magnate do his thing.

“Some of my customers are for it and some are against it,” said Don Gossage, whose barbershop is two blocks from the project site. “A lot of people don’t care. Some say this guy’s got more money than brains. Most of the time we talk sports around here, not old houses.”

Restaurateur Tara Williams, proprietor of the nearby Cafe Zazzle, said whatever Haas wants to do is OK with her. She said the architect’s drawings for the project don’t appear to alter the house’s looks.

“I feel a lot of the people who are against it are just freaked out by change,” she said. “I don’t live in that neighborhood so it doesn’t really matter to me. And digging to build the underground garage isn’t any deeper than digging to build a swimming pool.”

Steve Rubenstein is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: srubenstein@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SteveRubeSF