“She [CD Mexico] were really good. So quick on the ball,” recalled Bob Gansler, son of the former US men’s national team coach of the same name, who played for Bayern that year. “We didn’t have our best day, but they did [El Faro] were not afraid to attack in large numbers.”

Santiago Lopez remembers growing up with cup hero Angulo, who passed away a few years ago. Angulo’s son was the same age as Santiago and the two kicked the ball at halftime in El Farolito’s games at the historic Boxer Stadium, their home ground to this day.

“Everyone respected him [Angulo]’ Santiago said. “He was so deadly on the field.”

The semifinals were exciting and difficult, but the same cannot be said of this year’s tournament finals. CD Mexico drove through the game and defeated United German-Hungarians of Pennsylvania in an unequal score 5-0 to lift the trophy that now stands proud in the spiritual home of El Faro.

Downshift after 1993

Soon after, the team was known again as El Farolito SC. But it took them a while to get back to the highs they had in the early ’90s. “After 1993, the club really disappeared with the Open Cup,” Santiago said. “That wasn’t really a big priority.”

Coaches came and went, and the team competed only in amateur weekend tournaments and in the SFSFL, which was slowly declining in quality with the resurgence of professional sports, particularly Major League Soccer, formed in 1996.

It wasn’t until 2011 that Santiago decided to step in. At this point in El Farolito’s history, the team transitioned from the SFSFL to the National Premier Soccer League (NPSL).

“I had no interest in playing football or being involved with football,” Santiago said. Still, “I really wanted to help… and we kept winning. We won a few championships.”

In 2017, after winning the statewide NPSL’s Golden Gate Conference, El Farolito automatically earned a spot in the US Open Cup – the club’s first appearance since winning the championship.

It was nothing compared to their famous run a long time ago when El Farolito lost to SF City in the first round of the tournament. But the loss was a turning point in Santiago’s tenure as coach.

A return to the big stage

“Since then I’ve been fully focused,” said Santiago. “Not just win locally, win in NPSL or the league, but try to compete and qualify for the Open Cup.”

Santiago was determined to qualify again. He knew that finding the right balance between leading the entire team and helping run the restaurants was crucial to the club’s well-being.

Irene Lopez ensures that everything runs smoothly. She helps Santiago with smaller tasks like securing ambulances for games. She calls it a “routine” she’s grown accustomed to, but also says that “every year is special.”

The post San Francisco Originals El Farolito: Excessive Hopes Cast in Former Glory appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

From Carly Schwartz

San Francisco currently has no shortage of challenges.

More residents are uninhabited than ever before. Our guides cannot decide whether to close a street in Golden Gate Park or build new homes in an empty parking lot. When I walk my dog, we often tiptoe around broken glass on the sidewalk from another car break-in. Our school district is so broke that it faces a government takeover if it doesn’t get its finances in order.

These problems become even more apparent when you read the headlines. On any day, flick through breaking articles about San Francisco – both locally and nationally – and you’ll see a barrage of stories about how our criminal wasteland reached the point of no going back. Our reputation has sunk so low that even journalists are now writing about our image problem. Like meta.

Yet San Francisco remains a world-class, diverse, and colorful city for so many reasons. In the past year, more funds were allocated to support local start-ups than in any other region in the world. City hall is sitting on excess cash to fight homelessness. Public art is popping up in neighborhoods across the city, from the new installation in front of the Asian Art Museum to the mural in the mission honoring Carlos Santana and his little brother. Our problems may be numerous, but so are the ways we can address them.

Humans have the unique ability to give meaning to the world through storytelling. Stories reflect our reality, and society, in turn, is shaped by the stories we tell ourselves. If we keep up the story that San Francisco was irreparably broken, our city will only continue to collapse. It’s time to use storytelling to create a better place to live and work.

This is where The San Francisco Examiner comes in. For the first time in many years, the city’s oldest newspaper is locally owned and growing. Since I came on board as Editor-in-Chief six months ago, my team has worked hard to reshape our future. Today we are proud to introduce the first of many new initiatives: a redesigned print edition that reflects the real San Francisco in all its intricate glory.

The new Examiner’s pages don’t look like a traditional newspaper. We’ve broken them down into five key ways that capture The City from a new perspective:

Results takes a deeper look at the stories behind the headlines. Rather than recording everyday events in San Francisco as other local newspapers do, we will examine why things are the way they are in order to fundamentally understand our problems and how we can address them.

corrections explores how we could then begin to address our problems. Studies have shown that solution-oriented journalism makes readers more likely to search for news, increase problem-solving skills, and motivate readers to engage with their community. We’re not pretending to have the answers, but we definitely want to explore what they might look like.

Faces brings to life the many characters spread across our 49 square miles. Cities are made up of people, and the more personalities we can pack into our pages, the more accurately we can represent our home. We will use this section to profile and reinforce the interesting voices that drive San Francisco forward each day.

Forum enables us to take a stand on issues and take strong, sharp, innovative standpoints. We are not afraid to fight for a better San Francisco, and to do so we must hold our leaders accountable. We will cultivate a number of keen, fact-borne perspectives to enable readers to form an educated opinion on relevant matters.

And finally, fanfare captures the local zeitgeist through art, leisure, food, culture and sport. After all, having fun is still important! Our critics and experience junkies will preserve our culture both for ourselves and for future generations. This moment is meaningful and interesting – especially when we are through a global pandemic – and there is room to indulge in it.

We hope you enjoy the first edition of our reinvented approach to local news. Use these pages to create a deeper connection with the San Francisco that you know and love – a complex city worth scrutinizing but also worth celebrating.

Carly Schwartz is the editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Examiner.

The post Celebrating San Francisco in all its sophisticated glory appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

From Carly Schwartz

San Francisco currently has no shortage of challenges.

More residents are uninhabited than ever before. Our guides cannot decide whether to close a street in Golden Gate Park or build new homes in an empty parking lot. When I walk my dog, we often tiptoe around broken glass on the sidewalk from another car break-in. Our school district is so broke that it faces a government takeover if it doesn’t get its finances in order.

These problems become even more apparent when you read the headlines. On any day, flick through breaking articles about San Francisco – both locally and nationally – and you’ll see a barrage of stories about how our criminal wasteland reached the point of no going back. Our reputation has sunk so low that even journalists are now writing about our image problem. Like meta.

Yet San Francisco remains a world-class, diverse, and colorful city for so many reasons. In the past year, more funds were allocated to support local start-ups than in any other region in the world. City hall is sitting on excess cash to fight homelessness. Public art is popping up in neighborhoods across the city, from the new installation in front of the Asian Art Museum to the mural in the mission honoring Carlos Santana and his little brother. Our problems may be numerous, but so are the ways we can address them.

Humans have the unique ability to give meaning to the world through storytelling. Stories reflect our reality, and society, in turn, is shaped by the stories we tell ourselves. If we keep up the story that San Francisco was irreparably broken, our city will only continue to collapse. It’s time to use storytelling to create a better place to live and work.

This is where The San Francisco Examiner comes in. For the first time in many years, the city’s oldest newspaper is locally owned and growing. Since I came on board as Editor-in-Chief six months ago, my team has worked hard to reshape our future. Today we are proud to introduce the first of many new initiatives: a redesigned print edition that reflects the real San Francisco in all its intricate glory.

The new Examiner’s pages don’t look like a traditional newspaper. We’ve broken them down into five key ways that capture The City from a new perspective:

Results takes a deeper look at the stories behind the headlines. Rather than recording everyday events in San Francisco as other local newspapers do, we will examine why things are the way they are in order to fundamentally understand our problems and how we can address them.

corrections explores how we could then begin to address our problems. Studies have shown that solution-oriented journalism makes readers more likely to search for news, increase problem-solving skills, and motivate readers to engage with their community. We’re not pretending to have the answers, but we definitely want to explore what they might look like.

Faces brings to life the many characters spread across our 49 square miles. Cities are made up of people, and the more personalities we can pack into our pages, the more accurately we can represent our home. We will use this section to profile and reinforce the interesting voices that drive San Francisco forward each day.

Forum enables us to take a stand on issues and take strong, sharp, innovative standpoints. We are not afraid to fight for a better San Francisco, and to do so we must hold our leaders accountable. We will cultivate a number of keen, fact-borne perspectives to enable readers to form an educated opinion on relevant matters.

And finally, fanfare captures the local zeitgeist through art, leisure, food, culture and sport. After all, having fun is still important! Our critics and experience junkies will preserve our culture both for ourselves and for future generations. This moment is meaningful and interesting – especially when we are through a global pandemic – and there is room to indulge in it.

We hope you enjoy the first edition of our reinvented approach to local news. Use these pages to create a deeper connection with the San Francisco that you know and love – a complex city worth scrutinizing but also worth celebrating.

Carly Schwartz is the editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Examiner.

The post Celebrating San Francisco in all its sophisticated glory appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

San Francisco’s storied Victorians are making a comeback.

For over a decade, young homeowners—fueled by tech money and the dominance of modern architecture—were heavily reworking the city’s cache of historic properties. Many century-old homes had their interiors gutted to create open-plan living spaces, their architectural details removed to make way for precise corners, their woodwork painted bright white and their exteriors washed in various shades of gray.

Amid the pandemic, the tide is finally starting to turn. A growing number of younger residents of San Francisco are choosing to purchase and restore historic properties—in particular the Victorians that are so synonymous with the city.

According to Realtor.com, views of Victorian and Edwardian properties in San Francisco have increased by 80% year-to-year, and the median price-per-square-foot for these homes reached $1,050 in January, up 8.7% from last year. Views per property of modern single-family homes, meanwhile, were down 5.7% over the same period, with a 1.8% increase in price-per-square-foot to $831.

News Corp.

, owner of The Wall Street Journal, also operates Realtor.com under license from the National Association of Realtors.

The front parlor of Tracy Labernik and Evan Sirc’s home features many original Victorian details, such as decorative moldings, cornices and a picture rail on the wall. Pocket doors separate rooms.

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Real Estate

From aspirational residences to major commercial deals.

“For the last 10-12 years during the massive economic boom here, houses were in such demand that you had people buying Victorians, painting them a solid dark gray and stripping out the interiors in an effort to modernize the appearance of a house that they obviously didn’t like that much,” says Lynne Rutter, a decorative painter who serves as the president of Artistic License, a coalition of local artisans dedicated to period revival work. “Recently, I have seen far more thoughtful restoration happening, and younger homeowners who are doing more considerate work. They are eager to know more about their homes and will ask a lot of questions,” she says.

The Covid-19 outbreak has accelerated this trend, according to Bonnie Spindler, a real-estate agent who specializes in Victorians. Although San Francisco, like many urban centers, experienced a slowdown in general market activity during the pandemic, single-family homes saw a significant spike in interest, as many residents who chose to stay within the city looked to move out of apartments in exchange for something with more personal space. Amid this shift, the appeal of Victorian homes with original floor plans has increased, as people have found that open-concept housing isn’t as conducive to stay-at-home-life.

“If you are on Zoom calls, you can’t have two office meetings going at the same time,” Ms. Spindler says. “Everyone was gutting the walls between the kitchen and dining room, but if you burned shallots and had to start over, the entire house would smell like burned shallots.”

San Francisco’s Four Seasons houses—a row of four Queen Anne-style residences in the Upper Haight district built in the 1890s. Aimée Leifer and Tjarko Leifer bought the Winter house (third from left) in October 2016.

The Leifers wanted to preserve the history of their home while also updating it for modern life. They restored the original newel-post light in the entry, for example, but kept the main staircase painted a nontraditional white.

Traditional Victorian homes (built during the reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901) were designed with a specific area for every function of domestic life—dining room, drawing room, kitchen, parlor—often separated by pocket doors. “Living at home with no chance of entertaining has led some people to appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of San Francisco homes,” says Fiona Woods, a contractor with a focus on historic properties.

Victorian homes were devised with private chambers meant to allow for at-home doctor visits and births, and to protect against the deadly diseases that were so prevalent during the period, something that has become all the more timely in light of Covid-19. Toilets were kept separate from the rest of the bathroom, surfaces were finished in easy-to-clean porcelain and marble, and transom windows assured that sunlight and fresh air could circulate even when the doors were closed.

“Victorian architecture built in the era of disease and health paranoia has often been criticized for its overly sequestered and fragmented interior layouts that seemed outdated and fussy in previous decades,” Ms. Woods says. “Now it’s become surprisingly practical.”

The interiors of Jennifer Tobits and Sarah Piepmeier’s Victorian feature an eclectic mix of new and antique furnishings. Shown here is the dining room, which is located in what would have originally been a parlor.

In San Francisco, the result of this Victorian renaissance is a fusion of historic and modern design, modified for contemporary living—a notable departure from traditional movements of the past. “In the 1970s, when a lot of Victorians were being restored in earnest, many of the owners created time capsules inside of them, with all of the layers of window treatments and elaborate wallpaper and theme rooms full of 19th-century antiques,” Ms. Rutter says. “What is so different now are things like the use of space, or the eclectic mix of design from multiple eras.”

Simon Wistow and his partner, Stephanie Vacher, had been casually searching for a home to buy in San Francisco for about a year when the pandemic hit. The couple was living in a modest duplex, where sliding pocket doors enclosing the dining room created the only private area outside of the single bedroom. “With both of us working, we had to essentially negotiate who was going to get the dining room to go and take calls. That accelerates the process,” says Mr. Wistow, 43, co-founder and vice president of strategic initiatives for Fastly, a cloud-computing services provider.

As they looked, they realized they wanted something with a bit more history and charm. “We started developing a shorthand for what we call the ‘developer’s special,’ which was a house that had just been gutted and had all of the character sucked out of it,” says Mr. Wistow, who was born in England and raised in Germany.

The exterior of Simon Wistow and Stephanie Vacher’s Victorian (center), which they bought in July 2020 for $3.8 million.

With the aid of their agent, Tania Toubba of Sotheby’s International Realty, the couple found a 1900 Victorian in Haight Ashbury that had been renovated but still retained many original features and most recently served as an artist residency and gallery space. They bought the six-bedroom, 4,049-square-foot home in July 2020 for $3.8 million, and immediately moved in and began planning restorations and updates, starting with preserving an elaborate but disintegrating stained-glass window at the front of the house. The four-month process, overseen by local specialist Nzilani Glass Conservation, cost approximately $25,000 and involved removing the panels and taking them apart, salvaging all of the original broken pieces and rebuilding the missing glass.

“We love this city in all of its iterations and all of its eras, and being able to take care of wherever we live so that it can survive for another couple hundred years means a lot to us,” says Ms. Vacher, 36, who works as an artist and a website designer. Although the previous renovation added many contemporary elements, the couple plans to rehabilitate, highlight and add when suitable as many Victorian details as possible, including repurposing wood from elsewhere in the house into traditional-style cabinetry, installing period-specific wallpaper and restoring the main staircase, which is original to the house and “covered with more layers than an Everlasting Gobstopper,” Ms. Vacher says.

Aimée Leifer, a 41-year-old venture capitalist and interior designer, and her husband, Tjarko Leifer, 43, the co-founder of Wellio, a food-tech startup that was acquired by Kraft Heinz in 2018, have found a greater appreciation of their Victorian home over the past year.

“Friends with open-concept layouts have lamented their inability to separate out the different areas and activities,” says Ms. Leifer, who has two young boys, ages 3 and 5. “In a Victorian house, we can all be living, working, schooling, doing everything at the same time and not really know what anyone is up to.”

The couple purchased one of the well-known Four Seasons houses—a row of four lavish Queen Anne-style residences in the Upper Haight district built in the 1890s by shipwright John Whelan—for $2.625 million in October 2016. Known as the Winter house, the structure features an intricately painted blue facade that was still in relatively good condition, with a carved snowflake centerpiece on its second floor. The interiors, however, had not been updated in almost 50 years and were in need of a major renovation. “We wanted to strike a balance between preserving the beauty and history of the home while also making it comfortable and updating it for a modern family lifestyle,” Ms. Leifer says.

The Leifers with their sons, ages 3 and 5. During the pandemic, the dining room was often used as an art studio for the boys.

An Iconic San Francisco Victorian Fit for a Family

In their remodel, Tjarko and Aimée Leifer balanced the history of their home with modern life with their two children.

The back of the house has been painted white and features ample outdoor space.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

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The back of the house has been painted white and features ample outdoor space.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

With a budget of over $1 million, the 13-month project kept most of the original footprint intact while adding a new foundation, plumbing, heating and electrical, as well as an extensive remodel of the kitchen. Surgical renovations were needed to restore original details such as the fireplace surround in the living room and to rehabilitate pocket doors that had been sealed into the walls. They also built out the attic to contain a playroom, office and bathroom, automated the old carriage doors on the garage to house their Tesla and added contemporary touches throughout such as bold wallpaper and furnishings, as well as a backyard honey bear mural by their friend, the local street artist Fnnch.

Fnnch’s then-girlfriend and now wife, Leah Culver, a 38-year-old tech entrepreneur who currently works as a software engineer for

Twitter,

became one of the most prominent young Victorian homeowners when she purchased an iconic Painted Lady—one of the city’s most photographed Victorians built in the 1890s that sit in what is known as Postcard Row—in January of 2020.

In January 2020, 38-year-old tech entrepreneur Leah Culver purchased one of SanFrancisco’s iconic Painted Lady Victorians (middle) for $3.55 million. She is documenting the restoration process on an Instagram account.

“I wanted something move-in ready, but the things I was seeing just weren’t the right fit. A lot of them were modern or redone to be modern, and some of them weren’t done particularly well,” Ms. Culver says of her year-and-a-half search. The yellow-and-pink-hued three-level Painted Lady was on the market for less than a month before Culver purchased it for $3.55 million, or $800,000 over asking price.

The 2,588-square-foot property had been remodeled haphazardly in the 1960s or ‘70s and had fallen into disrepair. Ms. Culver is in the midst of planning an extensive restoration that will cost nearly as much as the purchase price. Although the layout of the bedrooms and some of the public areas will be reconfigured, she plans to restore as many historical details as possible based on old photographs and on touring her neighbors’ homes. As she awaits approvals from the city planning department, Ms. Culver has launched an Instagram account, @pinkpaintedlady, detailing the process, which currently has 16,600 followers.

In February 2021, the landmark Englander House was moved from its original location to a new spot seven blocks away. It was the first time in 40 years that a Victorian home had been relocated in San Francisco.

Photo:

Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

An aerial view of the Englander House relocation. The carefully orchestratedproduction cost around $500,000 and took over three years to plan.

Photo:

Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

Ms. Culver’s house isn’t the only Victorian that has gained attention on social media. In February, a crowd of mask-clad, iPhone-wielding onlookers filled the streets by Civic Center to watch the Englander House, a landmark Victorian residence built in 1880, move from its original location at 807 Franklin Street to a new spot seven blocks away, to make way for the construction of a 48-unit luxury rental facility. Videos of the house uploaded to Twitter and Instagram soon went viral.

It was the first time in 40 years that a Victorian home had been relocated in San Francisco, and the carefully orchestrated production, which involved lifting the 80-ton two-story Italianate-style structure and transporting it slowly by truck on large eight-wheel dollies, cost around $500,000 and took over three years to plan and get approved, according to Toby Morris, co-founder of Kerman Morris Architects, the firm in charge of the project.

In the new location, the house will be adjoined to a Victorian-era former mortuary and rehabilitated into 17 new apartments.

For Jennifer Tobits, a 46-year-old art conservator, preservation was top of mind when she purchased a 1900 Victorian in the Lower Haight district with her wife, attorney Sarah Piepmeier, 47, for $2.995 million in May 2016. The home was previously owned by Mark Stoermer, the bassist for the rock band The Killers, who listed it for the exact price he paid after only a few months, according to the couple. “This house was a total fixer-upper. It was a mess,” Ms. Tobits says. “But it was charming and the bones were great.”

Over the past few years, the couple has embarked on a slow and deliberate restoration that has involved replacing the roof and reconfiguring the second floor while retaining and reusing original doors and hardware and restoring Lincrusta wall coverings via a company from the U.K. that has been in business since 1877. They even reclaimed their neighbor’s 1890s Minton tiles and used them for the floor of their front porch.

The interior décor is an eclectic mix of new and antique furnishings, while nearly all of the architectural elements are either original, repurposed or reproduced to be authentically Victorian.

A Carefully Restored San Francisco Victorian

Owners Jennifer Tobits and Sarah Piepmeier have conducted a slow renovation that has retained and reused many original details.

Jennifer Tobits (left) and wife Sarah Piepmeier, with their dogs Eleanor and Hunter, in front of their Victorian home.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

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Jennifer Tobits (left) and wife Sarah Piepmeier, with their dogs Eleanor and Hunter, in front of their Victorian home.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

During the pandemic, Ms. Tobits and Ms. Piepmeier turned their attention to the facade. Referencing a black-and-white photograph found at the California Historical Society, they replaced windows, cleaned stained glass and re-created and salvaged parts of the damaged redwood exterior. The house was also given a new paint job: deep navy trimmed with shades of ivory and gray and highlighted with copper and 23.75-karat gold leaf detailing that illuminates its ornamental elements.

The exterior color palette of Victorian houses is perhaps one of the most divisive subjects when it comes to their historic preservation. Although San Francisco Victorians were originally painted neutral tones, they are better known for a rainbow of exuberant hues, a trend that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.

A Bubble Gum-Pink Victorian in San Francisco

Evan Sirc and Tracy Labernik painted their home a bright hue, but also kept many original Victorian-era details.

The formal dining room of Tracy Labernik and Evan Sirc’s Victorian home features wood-wall paneling, a stained-glass window and leaded glass built into a buffet that are all original to the house. A massive antique safe was added after the 1970s.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

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The formal dining room of Tracy Labernik and Evan Sirc’s Victorian home features wood-wall paneling, a stained-glass window and leaded glass built into a buffet that are all original to the house. A massive antique safe was added after the 1970s.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

Earlier this year, attorney Tracy Labernik and her husband, Evan Sirc, a radiologist, both 40 years old, spent over $35,000 transforming their recently purchased Italianate-style Victorian’s exterior from blue to bubble gum pink.

“I remember we were both standing on the sidewalk looking up at the house and grinning ear-to-ear,” says Ms. Labernik. “Whether it’s a way to find a small spark of joy in this pandemic, or something else, we aren’t sure. But it’s what we picture when we think of San Francisco Victorians.”

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Young Residents Are Restoring These San Francisco Homes to Their Original Glory Source link Young Residents Are Restoring These San Francisco Homes to Their Original Glory

The post Younger Residents Are Restoring These San Francisco Properties to Their Authentic Glory appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

San Francisco’s storied Victorians are making a comeback.

For over a decade, young homeowners—fueled by tech money and the dominance of modern architecture—were heavily reworking the city’s cache of historic properties. Many century-old homes had their interiors gutted to create open-plan living spaces, their architectural details removed to make way for precise corners, their woodwork painted bright white and their exteriors washed in various shades of gray.

Amid the pandemic, the tide is finally starting to turn. A growing number of younger residents of San Francisco are choosing to purchase and restore historic properties—in particular the Victorians that are so synonymous with the city.

According to Realtor.com, views of Victorian and Edwardian properties in San Francisco have increased by 80% year-to-year, and the median price-per-square-foot for these homes reached $1,050 in January, up 8.7% from last year. Views per property of modern single-family homes, meanwhile, were down 5.7% over the same period, with a 1.8% increase in price-per-square-foot to $831. News Corp., owner of The Wall Street Journal, also operates Realtor.com under license from the National Association of Realtors.

The front parlor of Tracy Labernik and Evan Sirc’s home features many original Victorian details, such as decorative moldings, cornices and a picture rail on the wall. Pocket doors separate rooms.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

“For the last 10-12 years during the massive economic boom here, houses were in such demand that you had people buying Victorians, painting them a solid dark gray and stripping out the interiors in an effort to modernize the appearance of a house that they obviously didn’t like that much,” says Lynne Rutter, a decorative painter who serves as the president of Artistic License, a coalition of local artisans dedicated to period revival work. “Recently, I have seen far more thoughtful restoration happening, and younger homeowners who are doing more considerate work. They are eager to know more about their homes and will ask a lot of questions,” she says.

More:These Luxury Markets Are Set to Get a Post-Vaccine Boost

The Covid-19 outbreak has accelerated this trend, according to Bonnie Spindler, a real-estate agent who specializes in Victorians. Although San Francisco, like many urban centers, experienced a slowdown in general market activity during the pandemic, single-family homes saw a significant spike in interest, as many residents who chose to stay within the city looked to move out of apartments in exchange for something with more personal space. Amid this shift, the appeal of Victorian homes with original floor plans has increased, as people have found that open-concept housing isn’t as conducive to stay-at-home-life.

“If you are on Zoom calls, you can’t have two office meetings going at the same time,” Ms. Spindler says. “Everyone was gutting the walls between the kitchen and dining room, but if you burned shallots and had to start over, the entire house would smell like burned shallots.”

San Francisco’s Four Seasons houses—a row of four Queen Anne-style residences in the Upper Haight district built in the 1890s. Aimée Leifer and Tjarko Leifer bought the Winter house (third from left) in October 2016.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

The Leifers wanted to preserve the history of their home while also updating it for modern life. They restored the original newel-post light in the entry, for example, but kept the main staircase painted a nontraditional white.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

Traditional Victorian homes (built during the reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901) were designed with a specific area for every function of domestic life—dining room, drawing room, kitchen, parlor—often separated by pocket doors. “Living at home with no chance of entertaining has led some people to appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of San Francisco homes,” says Fiona Woods, a contractor with a focus on historic properties.

Victorian homes were devised with private chambers meant to allow for at-home doctor visits and births, and to protect against the deadly diseases that were so prevalent during the period, something that has become all the more timely in light of Covid-19. Toilets were kept separate from the rest of the bathroom, surfaces were finished in easy-to-clean porcelain and marble, and transom windows assured that sunlight and fresh air could circulate even when the doors were closed.

“Victorian architecture built in the era of disease and health paranoia has often been criticized for its overly sequestered and fragmented interior layouts that seemed outdated and fussy in previous decades,” Ms. Woods says. “Now it’s become surprisingly practical.”

More:A Mansion, Once San Francisco’s Most Expensive Listing, Sells for a $10 Million-Plus Discount

The interiors of Jennifer Tobits and Sarah Piepmeier’s Victorian feature an eclectic mix of new and antique furnishings. Shown here is the dining room, which is located in what would have originally been a parlor.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

In San Francisco, the result of this Victorian renaissance is a fusion of historic and modern design, modified for contemporary living—a notable departure from traditional movements of the past. “In the 1970s, when a lot of Victorians were being restored in earnest, many of the owners created time capsules inside of them, with all of the layers of window treatments and elaborate wallpaper and theme rooms full of 19th-century antiques,” Ms. Rutter says. “What is so different now are things like the use of space, or the eclectic mix of design from multiple eras.”

Simon Wistow and his partner, Stephanie Vacher, had been casually searching for a home to buy in San Francisco for about a year when the pandemic hit. The couple was living in a modest duplex, where sliding pocket doors enclosing the dining room created the only private area outside of the single bedroom. “With both of us working, we had to essentially negotiate who was going to get the dining room to go and take calls. That accelerates the process,” says Mr. Wistow, 43, co-founder and vice president of strategic initiatives for Fastly, a cloud-computing services provider.

As they looked, they realized they wanted something with a bit more history and charm. “We started developing a shorthand for what we call the ‘developer’s special,’ which was a house that had just been gutted and had all of the character sucked out of it,” says Mr. Wistow, who was born in England and raised in Germany.

More:A 1933 Babe Ruth Baseball Card Could Fetch a Record US$5.2 Million at Auction

The exterior of Simon Wistow and Stephanie Vacher’s Victorian (center), which they bought in July 2020 for $3.8 million.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

With the aid of their agent, Tania Toubba of Sotheby’s International Realty, the couple found a 1900 Victorian in Haight Ashbury that had been renovated but still retained many original features and most recently served as an artist residency and gallery space. They bought the six-bedroom, 4,049-square-foot home in July 2020 for $3.8 million, and immediately moved in and began planning restorations and updates, starting with preserving an elaborate but disintegrating stained-glass window at the front of the house. The four-month process, overseen by local specialist Nzilani Glass Conservation, cost approximately $25,000 and involved removing the panels and taking them apart, salvaging all of the original broken pieces and rebuilding the missing glass.

“We love this city in all of its iterations and all of its eras, and being able to take care of wherever we live so that it can survive for another couple hundred years means a lot to us,” says Ms. Vacher, 36, who works as an artist and a website designer. Although the previous renovation added many contemporary elements, the couple plans to rehabilitate, highlight and add when suitable as many Victorian details as possible, including repurposing wood from elsewhere in the house into traditional-style cabinetry, installing period-specific wallpaper and restoring the main staircase, which is original to the house and “covered with more layers than an Everlasting Gobstopper,” Ms. Vacher says.

Aimée Leifer, a 41-year-old venture capitalist and interior designer, and her husband, Tjarko Leifer, 43, the co-founder of Wellio, a food-tech startup that was acquired by Kraft Heinz in 2018, have found a greater appreciation of their Victorian home over the past year.

More:A Bit of Paris in San Francisco Lists for $16.95 Million

“Friends with open-concept layouts have lamented their inability to separate out the different areas and activities,” says Ms. Leifer, who has two young boys, ages 3 and 5. “In a Victorian house, we can all be living, working, schooling, doing everything at the same time and not really know what anyone is up to.”

The couple purchased one of the well-known Four Seasons houses—a row of four lavish Queen Anne-style residences in the Upper Haight district built in the 1890s by shipwright John Whelan—for $2.625 million in October 2016. Known as the Winter house, the structure features an intricately painted blue facade that was still in relatively good condition, with a carved snowflake centerpiece on its second floor. The interiors, however, had not been updated in almost 50 years and were in need of a major renovation. “We wanted to strike a balance between preserving the beauty and history of the home while also making it comfortable and updating it for a modern family lifestyle,” Ms. Leifer says.

The Leifers with their sons, ages 3 and 5. During the pandemic, the dining room was often used as an art studio for the boys.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

With a budget of over $1 million, the 13-month project kept most of the original footprint intact while adding a new foundation, plumbing, heating and electrical, as well as an extensive remodel of the kitchen. Surgical renovations were needed to restore original details such as the fireplace surround in the living room and to rehabilitate pocket doors that had been sealed into the walls. They also built out the attic to contain a playroom, office and bathroom, automated the old carriage doors on the garage to house their Tesla and added contemporary touches throughout such as bold wallpaper and furnishings, as well as a backyard honey bear mural by their friend, the local street artist Fnnch.

Fnnch’s then-girlfriend and now wife, Leah Culver, a 38-year-old tech entrepreneur who currently works as a software engineer for Twitter, became one of the most prominent young Victorian homeowners when she purchased an iconic Painted Lady—one of the city’s most photographed Victorians built in the 1890s that sit in what is known as Postcard Row—in January of 2020.

In January 2020, 38-year-old tech entrepreneur Leah Culver purchased one of SanFrancisco’s iconic Painted Lady Victorians (middle) for $3.55 million. She is documenting the restoration process on an Instagram account.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

“I wanted something move-in ready, but the things I was seeing just weren’t the right fit. A lot of them were modern or redone to be modern, and some of them weren’t done particularly well,” Ms. Culver says of her year-and-a-half search. The yellow-and-pink-hued three-level Painted Lady was on the market for less than a month before Culver purchased it for $3.55 million, or $800,000 over asking price.

More:From Santa Cruz to California Wine Country, Luxury Home Sales Doubled During the Pandemic

The 2,588-square-foot property had been remodeled haphazardly in the 1960s or ‘70s and had fallen into disrepair. Ms. Culver is in the midst of planning an extensive restoration that will cost nearly as much as the purchase price. Although the layout of the bedrooms and some of the public areas will be reconfigured, she plans to restore as many historical details as possible based on old photographs and on touring her neighbors’ homes. As she awaits approvals from the city planning department, Ms. Culver has launched an Instagram account, @pinkpaintedlady, detailing the process, which currently has 16,600 followers.

In February 2021, the landmark Englander House was moved from its original location to a new spot seven blocks away. It was the first time in 40 years that a Victorian home had been relocated in San Francisco.

Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

An aerial view of the Englander House relocation. The carefully orchestratedproduction cost around $500,000 and took over three years to plan.

Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

Ms. Culver’s house isn’t the only Victorian that has gained attention on social media. In February, a crowd of mask-clad, iPhone-wielding onlookers filled the streets by Civic Center to watch the Englander House, a landmark Victorian residence built in 1880, move from its original location at 807 Franklin Street to a new spot seven blocks away, to make way for the construction of a 48-unit luxury rental facility. Videos of the house uploaded to Twitter and Instagram soon went viral.

It was the first time in 40 years that a Victorian home had been relocated in San Francisco, and the carefully orchestrated production, which involved lifting the 80-ton two-story Italianate-style structure and transporting it slowly by truck on large eight-wheel dollies, cost around $500,000 and took over three years to plan and get approved, according to Toby Morris, co-founder of Kerman Morris Architects, the firm in charge of the project.

In the new location, the house will be adjoined to a Victorian-era former mortuary and rehabilitated into 17 new apartments.

More:Bing Crosby’s Onetime Bay Area Home Hits the Market for $13.75 Million

For Jennifer Tobits, a 46-year-old art conservator, preservation was top of mind when she purchased a 1900 Victorian in the Lower Haight district with her wife, attorney Sarah Piepmeier, 47, for $2.995 million in May 2016. The home was previously owned by Mark Stoermer, the bassist for the rock band The Killers, who listed it for the exact price he paid after only a few months, according to the couple. “This house was a total fixer-upper. It was a mess,” Ms. Tobits says. “But it was charming and the bones were great.”

Over the past few years, the couple has embarked on a slow and deliberate restoration that has involved replacing the roof and reconfiguring the second floor while retaining and reusing original doors and hardware and restoring Lincrusta wall coverings via a company from the U.K. that has been in business since 1877. They even reclaimed their neighbor’s 1890s Minton tiles and used them for the floor of their front porch.

The interior décor is an eclectic mix of new and antique furnishings, while nearly all of the architectural elements are either original, repurposed or reproduced to be authentically Victorian.

More:5 Rooms, 5 Redesigns

During the pandemic, Ms. Tobits and Ms. Piepmeier turned their attention to the facade. Referencing a black-and-white photograph found at the California Historical Society, they replaced windows, cleaned stained glass and re-created and salvaged parts of the damaged redwood exterior. The house was also given a new paint job: deep navy trimmed with shades of ivory and gray and highlighted with copper and 23.75-karat gold leaf detailing that illuminates its ornamental elements.

The exterior color palette of Victorian houses is perhaps one of the most divisive subjects when it comes to their historic preservation. Although San Francisco Victorians were originally painted neutral tones, they are better known for a rainbow of exuberant hues, a trend that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.

Earlier this year, attorney Tracy Labernik and her husband, Evan Sirc, a radiologist, both 40 years old, spent over $35,000 transforming their recently purchased Italianate-style Victorian’s exterior from blue to bubble gum pink.

“I remember we were both standing on the sidewalk looking up at the house and grinning ear-to-ear,” says Ms. Labernik. “Whether it’s a way to find a small spark of joy in this pandemic, or something else, we aren’t sure. But it’s what we picture when we think of San Francisco Victorians.”

The post San Francisco’s Victorian Homes Are Being Restored to Their Unique Glory appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

San Francisco’s storied Victorians are making a comeback.

For over a decade, young homeowners—fueled by tech money and the dominance of modern architecture—were heavily reworking the city’s cache of historic properties. Many century-old homes had their interiors gutted to create open-plan living spaces, their architectural details removed to make way for precise corners, their woodwork painted bright white and their exteriors washed in various shades of gray.

Amid the pandemic, the tide is finally starting to turn. A growing number of younger residents of San Francisco are choosing to purchase and restore historic properties—in particular the Victorians that are so synonymous with the city.

According to Realtor.com, views of Victorian and Edwardian properties in San Francisco have increased by 80% year-to-year, and the median price-per-square-foot for these homes reached $1,050 in January, up 8.7% from last year. Views per property of modern single-family homes, meanwhile, were down 5.7% over the same period, with a 1.8% increase in price-per-square-foot to $831. News Corp. , owner of The Wall Street Journal, also operates Realtor.com under license from the National Association of Realtors.

Tracy Labernik and Evan Sirc purchased the Noe Valley Victorian at top for $3.2 million in December 2018. During the pandemic, they painted it bubble gum pink. The front parlor, seen here, features many original Victorian details, such as decorative moldings, cornices and a picture rail on the wall.

(Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal)

“For the last 10-12 years during the massive economic boom here, houses were in such demand that you had people buying Victorians, painting them a solid dark gray and stripping out the interiors in an effort to modernize the appearance of a house that they obviously didn’t like that much,” says Lynne Rutter, a decorative painter who serves as the president of Artistic License, a coalition of local artisans dedicated to period revival work. “Recently, I have seen far more thoughtful restoration happening, and younger homeowners who are doing more considerate work. They are eager to know more about their homes and will ask a lot of questions,” she says.

The Covid-19 outbreak has accelerated this trend, according to Bonnie Spindler, a real-estate agent who specializes in Victorians. Although San Francisco, like many urban centers, experienced a slowdown in general market activity during the pandemic, single-family homes saw a significant spike in interest, as many residents who chose to stay within the city looked to move out of apartments in exchange for something with more personal space. Amid this shift, the appeal of Victorian homes with original floor plans has increased, as people have found that open-concept housing isn’t as conducive to stay-at-home-life.

“If you are on Zoom calls, you can’t have two office meetings going at the same time,” Ms. Spindler says. “Everyone was gutting the walls between the kitchen and dining room, but if you burned shallots and had to start over, the entire house would smell like burned shallots.”

San Francisco’s Four Seasons houses—a row of four Queen Anne-style residences in the Upper Haight district built in the 1890s. Aimée Leifer and Tjarko Leifer bought the Winter house (third from left) in October 2016.

(Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal)

The Leifers wanted to preserve the history of their home while also updating it for modern life. They restored the original newel-post light in the entry, for example, but kept the main staircase painted a nontraditional white.

(Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal)

Traditional Victorian homes (built during the reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901) were designed with a specific area for every function of domestic life—dining room, drawing room, kitchen, parlor—often separated by pocket doors. “Living at home with no chance of entertaining has led some people to appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of San Francisco homes,” says Fiona Woods, a contractor with a focus on historic properties.

Victorian homes were devised with private chambers meant to allow for at-home doctor visits and births, and to protect against the deadly diseases that were so prevalent during the period, something that has become all the more timely in light of Covid-19. Toilets were kept separate from the rest of the bathroom, surfaces were finished in easy-to-clean porcelain and marble, and transom windows assured that sunlight and fresh air could circulate even when the doors were closed.

“Victorian architecture built in the era of disease and health paranoia has often been criticized for its overly sequestered and fragmented interior layouts that seemed outdated and fussy in previous decades,” Ms. Woods says. “Now it’s become surprisingly practical.”

The interiors of Jennifer Tobits and Sarah Piepmeier’s Victorian feature an eclectic mix of new and antique furnishings. Shown here is the dining room, which is located in what would have originally been a parlor.

(Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal)

In San Francisco, the result of this Victorian renaissance is a fusion of historic and modern design, modified for contemporary living—a notable departure from traditional movements of the past. “In the 1970s, when a lot of Victorians were being restored in earnest, many of the owners created time capsules inside of them, with all of the layers of window treatments and elaborate wallpaper and theme rooms full of 19th-century antiques,” Ms. Rutter says. “What is so different now are things like the use of space, or the eclectic mix of design from multiple eras.”

Simon Wistow and his partner, Stephanie Vacher, had been casually searching for a home to buy in San Francisco for about a year when the pandemic hit. The couple was living in a modest duplex, where sliding pocket doors enclosing the dining room created the only private area outside of the single bedroom. “With both of us working, we had to essentially negotiate who was going to get the dining room to go and take calls. That accelerates the process,” says Mr. Wistow, 43, co-founder and vice president of strategic initiatives for Fastly, a cloud-computing services provider.

As they looked, they realized they wanted something with a bit more history and charm. “We started developing a shorthand for what we call the ‘developer’s special,’ which was a house that had just been gutted and had all of the character sucked out of it,” says Mr. Wistow, who was born in England and raised in Germany.

The exterior of Simon Wistow and Stephanie Vacher’s Victorian (center), which they bought in July 2020 for $3.8 million.

( Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal)

With the aid of their agent, Tania Toubba of Sotheby’s International Realty, the couple found a 1900 Victorian in Haight Ashbury that had been renovated but still retained many original features and most recently served as an artist residency and gallery space. They bought the six-bedroom, 4,049-square-foot home in July 2020 for $3.8 million, and immediately moved in and began planning restorations and updates, starting with preserving an elaborate but disintegrating stained-glass window at the front of the house. The four-month process, overseen by local specialist Nzilani Glass Conservation, cost approximately $25,000 and involved removing the panels and taking them apart, salvaging all of the original broken pieces and rebuilding the missing glass.

“We love this city in all of its iterations and all of its eras, and being able to take care of wherever we live so that it can survive for another couple hundred years means a lot to us,” says Ms. Vacher, 36, who works as an artist and a website designer. Although the previous renovation added many contemporary elements, the couple plans to rehabilitate, highlight and add when suitable as many Victorian details as possible, including repurposing wood from elsewhere in the house into traditional-style cabinetry, installing period-specific wallpaper and restoring the main staircase, which is original to the house and “covered with more layers than an Everlasting Gobstopper,” Ms. Vacher says.

Aimée Leifer, a 41-year-old venture capitalist and interior designer, and her husband, Tjarko Leifer, 43, the co-founder of Wellio, a food-tech startup that was acquired by Kraft Heinz in 2018, have found a greater appreciation of their Victorian home over the past year.

“Friends with open-concept layouts have lamented their inability to separate out the different areas and activities,” says Ms. Leifer, who has two young boys, ages 3 and 5. “In a Victorian house, we can all be living, working, schooling, doing everything at the same time and not really know what anyone is up to.”

The couple purchased one of the well-known Four Seasons houses—a row of four lavish Queen Anne-style residences in the Upper Haight district built in the 1890s by shipwright John Whelan—for $2.625 million in October 2016. Known as the Winter house, the structure features an intricately painted blue facade that was still in relatively good condition, with a carved snowflake centerpiece on its second floor. The interiors, however, had not been updated in almost 50 years and were in need of a major renovation. “We wanted to strike a balance between preserving the beauty and history of the home while also making it comfortable and updating it for a modern family lifestyle,” Ms. Leifer says.

The Leifers with their sons, ages 3 and 5. During the pandemic, the dining room was often used as an art studio for the boys.

(Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal)

With a budget of over $1 million, the 13-month project kept most of the original footprint intact while adding a new foundation, plumbing, heating and electrical, as well as an extensive remodel of the kitchen. Surgical renovations were needed to restore original details such as the fireplace surround in the living room and to rehabilitate pocket doors that had been sealed into the walls. They also built out the attic to contain a playroom, office and bathroom, automated the old carriage doors on the garage to house their Tesla and added contemporary touches throughout such as bold wallpaper and furnishings, as well as a backyard honey bear mural by their friend, the local street artist Fnnch.

Fnnch’s then-girlfriend and now wife, Leah Culver, a 38-year-old tech entrepreneur who currently works as a software engineer for Twitter, became one of the most prominent young Victorian homeowners when she purchased an iconic Painted Lady—one of the city’s most photographed Victorians built in the 1890s that sit in what is known as Postcard Row—in January of 2020.

In January 2020, 38-year-old tech entrepreneur Leah Culver purchased one of San Francisco’s iconic Painted Lady Victorians (middle) for $3.55 million. She is documenting the restoration process on an Instagram account.

(Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal)

“I wanted something move-in ready, but the things I was seeing just weren’t the right fit. A lot of them were modern or redone to be modern, and some of them weren’t done particularly well,” Ms. Culver says of her year-and-a-half search. The yellow-and-pink-hued three-level Painted Lady was on the market for less than a month before Culver purchased it for $3.55 million, or $800,000 over asking price.

The 2,588-square-foot property had been remodeled haphazardly in the 1960s or ‘70s and had fallen into disrepair. Ms. Culver is in the midst of planning an extensive restoration that will cost nearly as much as the purchase price. Although the layout of the bedrooms and some of the public areas will be reconfigured, she plans to restore as many historical details as possible based on old photographs and on touring her neighbors’ homes. As she awaits approvals from the city planning department, Ms. Culver has launched an Instagram account, @pinkpaintedlady, detailing the process, which currently has 16,600 followers.

In February 2021, the landmark Englander House was moved from its original location to a new spot seven blocks away. It was the first time in 40 years that a Victorian home had been relocated in San Francisco.

(Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

Ms. Culver’s house isn’t the only Victorian that has gained attention on social media. In February, a crowd of mask-clad, iPhone-wielding onlookers filled the streets by Civic Center to watch the Englander House, a landmark Victorian residence built in 1880, move from its original location at 807 Franklin Street to a new spot seven blocks away, to make way for the construction of a 48-unit luxury rental facility. Videos of the house uploaded to Twitter and Instagram soon went viral.

It was the first time in 40 years that a Victorian home had been relocated in San Francisco, and the carefully orchestrated production, which involved lifting the 80-ton two-story Italianate-style structure and transporting it slowly by truck on large eight-wheel dollies, cost around $500,000 and took over three years to plan and get approved, according to Toby Morris, co-founder of Kerman Morris Architects, the firm in charge of the project.

In the new location, the house will be adjoined to a Victorian-era former mortuary and rehabilitated into 17 new apartments.

Jennifer Tobits (left) and wife Sarah Piepmeier, with their dogs Eleanor and Hunter, in front of their Victorian home.

(Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal)

For Jennifer Tobits, a 46-year-old art conservator, preservation was top of mind when she purchased a 1900 Victorian in the Lower Haight district with her wife, attorney Sarah Piepmeier, 47, for $2.995 million in May 2016. The home was previously owned by Mark Stoermer, the bassist for the rock band The Killers, who listed it for the exact price he paid after only a few months, according to the couple. “This house was a total fixer-upper. It was a mess,” Ms. Tobits says. “But it was charming and the bones were great.”

Over the past few years, the couple has embarked on a slow and deliberate restoration that has involved replacing the roof and reconfiguring the second floor while retaining and reusing original doors and hardware and restoring Lincrusta wall coverings via a company from the U.K. that has been in business since 1877. They even reclaimed their neighbor’s 1890s Minton tiles and used them for the floor of their front porch.

The interior décor is an eclectic mix of new and antique furnishings, while nearly all of the architectural elements are either original, repurposed or reproduced to be authentically Victorian.

During the pandemic, Ms. Tobits and Ms. Piepmeier turned their attention to the facade. Referencing a black-and-white photograph found at the California Historical Society, they replaced windows, cleaned stained glass and re-created and salvaged parts of the damaged redwood exterior. The house was also given a new paint job: deep navy trimmed with shades of ivory and gray and highlighted with copper and 23.75-karat gold leaf detailing that illuminates its ornamental elements.

The exterior color palette of Victorian houses is perhaps one of the most divisive subjects when it comes to their historic preservation. Although San Francisco Victorians were originally painted neutral tones, they are better known for a rainbow of exuberant hues, a trend that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.

Earlier this year, attorney Tracy Labernik and her husband, Evan Sirc, a radiologist, both 40 years old, spent over $35,000 transforming their recently purchased Italianate-style Victorian’s exterior from blue to bubble gum pink.

“I remember we were both standing on the sidewalk looking up at the house and grinning ear-to-ear,” says Ms. Labernik. “Whether it’s a way to find a small spark of joy in this pandemic, or something else, we aren’t sure. But it’s what we picture when we think of San Francisco Victorians.”

The post Younger Residents Are Restoring These San Francisco Properties to Their Authentic Glory appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

San Francisco’s storied Victorians are making a comeback.

For over a decade, young homeowners—fueled by tech money and the dominance of modern architecture—were heavily reworking the city’s cache of historic properties. Many century-old homes had their interiors gutted to create open-plan living spaces, their architectural details removed to make way for precise corners, their woodwork painted bright white and their exteriors washed in various shades of gray.

Amid the pandemic, the tide is finally starting to turn. A growing number of younger residents of San Francisco are choosing to purchase and restore historic properties—in particular the Victorians that are so synonymous with the city.

According to Realtor.com, views of Victorian and Edwardian properties in San Francisco have increased by 80% year-to-year, and the median price-per-square-foot for these homes reached $1,050 in January, up 8.7% from last year. Views per property of modern single-family homes, meanwhile, were down 5.7% over the same period, with a 1.8% increase in price-per-square-foot to $831. News Corp., owner of The Wall Street Journal, also operates Realtor.com under license from the National Association of Realtors.

The front parlor of Tracy Labernik and Evan Sirc’s home features many original Victorian details, such as decorative moldings, cornices and a picture rail on the wall. Pocket doors separate rooms.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

“For the last 10-12 years during the massive economic boom here, houses were in such demand that you had people buying Victorians, painting them a solid dark gray and stripping out the interiors in an effort to modernize the appearance of a house that they obviously didn’t like that much,” says Lynne Rutter, a decorative painter who serves as the president of Artistic License, a coalition of local artisans dedicated to period revival work. “Recently, I have seen far more thoughtful restoration happening, and younger homeowners who are doing more considerate work. They are eager to know more about their homes and will ask a lot of questions,” she says.

More:These Luxury Markets Are Set to Get a Post-Vaccine Boost

The Covid-19 outbreak has accelerated this trend, according to Bonnie Spindler, a real-estate agent who specializes in Victorians. Although San Francisco, like many urban centers, experienced a slowdown in general market activity during the pandemic, single-family homes saw a significant spike in interest, as many residents who chose to stay within the city looked to move out of apartments in exchange for something with more personal space. Amid this shift, the appeal of Victorian homes with original floor plans has increased, as people have found that open-concept housing isn’t as conducive to stay-at-home-life.

“If you are on Zoom calls, you can’t have two office meetings going at the same time,” Ms. Spindler says. “Everyone was gutting the walls between the kitchen and dining room, but if you burned shallots and had to start over, the entire house would smell like burned shallots.”

San Francisco’s Four Seasons houses—a row of four Queen Anne-style residences in the Upper Haight district built in the 1890s. Aimée Leifer and Tjarko Leifer bought the Winter house (third from left) in October 2016.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

The Leifers wanted to preserve the history of their home while also updating it for modern life. They restored the original newel-post light in the entry, for example, but kept the main staircase painted a nontraditional white.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

Traditional Victorian homes (built during the reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901) were designed with a specific area for every function of domestic life—dining room, drawing room, kitchen, parlor—often separated by pocket doors. “Living at home with no chance of entertaining has led some people to appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of San Francisco homes,” says Fiona Woods, a contractor with a focus on historic properties.

Victorian homes were devised with private chambers meant to allow for at-home doctor visits and births, and to protect against the deadly diseases that were so prevalent during the period, something that has become all the more timely in light of Covid-19. Toilets were kept separate from the rest of the bathroom, surfaces were finished in easy-to-clean porcelain and marble, and transom windows assured that sunlight and fresh air could circulate even when the doors were closed.

“Victorian architecture built in the era of disease and health paranoia has often been criticized for its overly sequestered and fragmented interior layouts that seemed outdated and fussy in previous decades,” Ms. Woods says. “Now it’s become surprisingly practical.”

More:A Mansion, Once San Francisco’s Most Expensive Listing, Sells for a $10 Million-Plus Discount

The interiors of Jennifer Tobits and Sarah Piepmeier’s Victorian feature an eclectic mix of new and antique furnishings. Shown here is the dining room, which is located in what would have originally been a parlor.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

In San Francisco, the result of this Victorian renaissance is a fusion of historic and modern design, modified for contemporary living—a notable departure from traditional movements of the past. “In the 1970s, when a lot of Victorians were being restored in earnest, many of the owners created time capsules inside of them, with all of the layers of window treatments and elaborate wallpaper and theme rooms full of 19th-century antiques,” Ms. Rutter says. “What is so different now are things like the use of space, or the eclectic mix of design from multiple eras.”

Simon Wistow and his partner, Stephanie Vacher, had been casually searching for a home to buy in San Francisco for about a year when the pandemic hit. The couple was living in a modest duplex, where sliding pocket doors enclosing the dining room created the only private area outside of the single bedroom. “With both of us working, we had to essentially negotiate who was going to get the dining room to go and take calls. That accelerates the process,” says Mr. Wistow, 43, co-founder and vice president of strategic initiatives for Fastly, a cloud-computing services provider.

As they looked, they realized they wanted something with a bit more history and charm. “We started developing a shorthand for what we call the ‘developer’s special,’ which was a house that had just been gutted and had all of the character sucked out of it,” says Mr. Wistow, who was born in England and raised in Germany.

More:A 1933 Babe Ruth Baseball Card Could Fetch a Record US$5.2 Million at Auction

The exterior of Simon Wistow and Stephanie Vacher’s Victorian (center), which they bought in July 2020 for $3.8 million.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

With the aid of their agent, Tania Toubba of Sotheby’s International Realty, the couple found a 1900 Victorian in Haight Ashbury that had been renovated but still retained many original features and most recently served as an artist residency and gallery space. They bought the six-bedroom, 4,049-square-foot home in July 2020 for $3.8 million, and immediately moved in and began planning restorations and updates, starting with preserving an elaborate but disintegrating stained-glass window at the front of the house. The four-month process, overseen by local specialist Nzilani Glass Conservation, cost approximately $25,000 and involved removing the panels and taking them apart, salvaging all of the original broken pieces and rebuilding the missing glass.

“We love this city in all of its iterations and all of its eras, and being able to take care of wherever we live so that it can survive for another couple hundred years means a lot to us,” says Ms. Vacher, 36, who works as an artist and a website designer. Although the previous renovation added many contemporary elements, the couple plans to rehabilitate, highlight and add when suitable as many Victorian details as possible, including repurposing wood from elsewhere in the house into traditional-style cabinetry, installing period-specific wallpaper and restoring the main staircase, which is original to the house and “covered with more layers than an Everlasting Gobstopper,” Ms. Vacher says.

Aimée Leifer, a 41-year-old venture capitalist and interior designer, and her husband, Tjarko Leifer, 43, the co-founder of Wellio, a food-tech startup that was acquired by Kraft Heinz in 2018, have found a greater appreciation of their Victorian home over the past year.

More:A Bit of Paris in San Francisco Lists for $16.95 Million

“Friends with open-concept layouts have lamented their inability to separate out the different areas and activities,” says Ms. Leifer, who has two young boys, ages 3 and 5. “In a Victorian house, we can all be living, working, schooling, doing everything at the same time and not really know what anyone is up to.”

The couple purchased one of the well-known Four Seasons houses—a row of four lavish Queen Anne-style residences in the Upper Haight district built in the 1890s by shipwright John Whelan—for $2.625 million in October 2016. Known as the Winter house, the structure features an intricately painted blue facade that was still in relatively good condition, with a carved snowflake centerpiece on its second floor. The interiors, however, had not been updated in almost 50 years and were in need of a major renovation. “We wanted to strike a balance between preserving the beauty and history of the home while also making it comfortable and updating it for a modern family lifestyle,” Ms. Leifer says.

The Leifers with their sons, ages 3 and 5. During the pandemic, the dining room was often used as an art studio for the boys.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

With a budget of over $1 million, the 13-month project kept most of the original footprint intact while adding a new foundation, plumbing, heating and electrical, as well as an extensive remodel of the kitchen. Surgical renovations were needed to restore original details such as the fireplace surround in the living room and to rehabilitate pocket doors that had been sealed into the walls. They also built out the attic to contain a playroom, office and bathroom, automated the old carriage doors on the garage to house their Tesla and added contemporary touches throughout such as bold wallpaper and furnishings, as well as a backyard honey bear mural by their friend, the local street artist Fnnch.

Fnnch’s then-girlfriend and now wife, Leah Culver, a 38-year-old tech entrepreneur who currently works as a software engineer for Twitter, became one of the most prominent young Victorian homeowners when she purchased an iconic Painted Lady—one of the city’s most photographed Victorians built in the 1890s that sit in what is known as Postcard Row—in January of 2020.

In January 2020, 38-year-old tech entrepreneur Leah Culver purchased one of SanFrancisco’s iconic Painted Lady Victorians (middle) for $3.55 million. She is documenting the restoration process on an Instagram account.

Jason Henry for The Wall Street Journal

“I wanted something move-in ready, but the things I was seeing just weren’t the right fit. A lot of them were modern or redone to be modern, and some of them weren’t done particularly well,” Ms. Culver says of her year-and-a-half search. The yellow-and-pink-hued three-level Painted Lady was on the market for less than a month before Culver purchased it for $3.55 million, or $800,000 over asking price.

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The 2,588-square-foot property had been remodeled haphazardly in the 1960s or ‘70s and had fallen into disrepair. Ms. Culver is in the midst of planning an extensive restoration that will cost nearly as much as the purchase price. Although the layout of the bedrooms and some of the public areas will be reconfigured, she plans to restore as many historical details as possible based on old photographs and on touring her neighbors’ homes. As she awaits approvals from the city planning department, Ms. Culver has launched an Instagram account, @pinkpaintedlady, detailing the process, which currently has 16,600 followers.

In February 2021, the landmark Englander House was moved from its original location to a new spot seven blocks away. It was the first time in 40 years that a Victorian home had been relocated in San Francisco.

Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

An aerial view of the Englander House relocation. The carefully orchestratedproduction cost around $500,000 and took over three years to plan.

Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

Ms. Culver’s house isn’t the only Victorian that has gained attention on social media. In February, a crowd of mask-clad, iPhone-wielding onlookers filled the streets by Civic Center to watch the Englander House, a landmark Victorian residence built in 1880, move from its original location at 807 Franklin Street to a new spot seven blocks away, to make way for the construction of a 48-unit luxury rental facility. Videos of the house uploaded to Twitter and Instagram soon went viral.

It was the first time in 40 years that a Victorian home had been relocated in San Francisco, and the carefully orchestrated production, which involved lifting the 80-ton two-story Italianate-style structure and transporting it slowly by truck on large eight-wheel dollies, cost around $500,000 and took over three years to plan and get approved, according to Toby Morris, co-founder of Kerman Morris Architects, the firm in charge of the project.

In the new location, the house will be adjoined to a Victorian-era former mortuary and rehabilitated into 17 new apartments.

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For Jennifer Tobits, a 46-year-old art conservator, preservation was top of mind when she purchased a 1900 Victorian in the Lower Haight district with her wife, attorney Sarah Piepmeier, 47, for $2.995 million in May 2016. The home was previously owned by Mark Stoermer, the bassist for the rock band The Killers, who listed it for the exact price he paid after only a few months, according to the couple. “This house was a total fixer-upper. It was a mess,” Ms. Tobits says. “But it was charming and the bones were great.”

Over the past few years, the couple has embarked on a slow and deliberate restoration that has involved replacing the roof and reconfiguring the second floor while retaining and reusing original doors and hardware and restoring Lincrusta wall coverings via a company from the U.K. that has been in business since 1877. They even reclaimed their neighbor’s 1890s Minton tiles and used them for the floor of their front porch.

The interior décor is an eclectic mix of new and antique furnishings, while nearly all of the architectural elements are either original, repurposed or reproduced to be authentically Victorian.

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During the pandemic, Ms. Tobits and Ms. Piepmeier turned their attention to the facade. Referencing a black-and-white photograph found at the California Historical Society, they replaced windows, cleaned stained glass and re-created and salvaged parts of the damaged redwood exterior. The house was also given a new paint job: deep navy trimmed with shades of ivory and gray and highlighted with copper and 23.75-karat gold leaf detailing that illuminates its ornamental elements.

The exterior color palette of Victorian houses is perhaps one of the most divisive subjects when it comes to their historic preservation. Although San Francisco Victorians were originally painted neutral tones, they are better known for a rainbow of exuberant hues, a trend that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.

Earlier this year, attorney Tracy Labernik and her husband, Evan Sirc, a radiologist, both 40 years old, spent over $35,000 transforming their recently purchased Italianate-style Victorian’s exterior from blue to bubble gum pink.

“I remember we were both standing on the sidewalk looking up at the house and grinning ear-to-ear,” says Ms. Labernik. “Whether it’s a way to find a small spark of joy in this pandemic, or something else, we aren’t sure. But it’s what we picture when we think of San Francisco Victorians.”

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San Francisco’s famous Victorians are making a comeback.

For over a decade, young homeowners – driven by tech money and the dominance of modern architecture – heavily revamped the city’s cache of historic real estate. Many centuries-old houses have had their interiors gutted to create open living spaces. The architectural details have been removed to make room for precise corners. The woodwork was painted bright white and the outside was kept in different shades of gray.

In the midst of the pandemic, the tide is finally starting to turn. A growing number of younger San Francisco residents are choosing to buy and restore historic properties – especially the Victorians who are so synonymous with the city.

According to Realtor.com, the number of Victorian and Edwardian homes in San Francisco has increased 80% year over year, and the average price per square foot for these homes reached $ 1,050 in January, up 8.7% year over year. Views per property of modern single family homes decreased 5.7% over the same period, with the price per square foot increasing 1.8% to $ 831. News Corp. , Owner of the Wall Street Journal, also operates Realtor.com under license from the National Association of Realtors.

“Over the past 10 to 12 years during the massive economic boom, homes were so in demand that people bought Victorians, painted them dark gray, and removed the interiors to update the look of a house that they obviously didn’t have that good fallen, ”says Lynne Rutter, a decorative painter who serves as president of Artistic License, a coalition of local artisans dedicated to revitalization. “Lately I’ve seen much more thoughtful restoration work and younger homeowners doing more considerate work. They really want to know more about their homes and will ask lots of questions, ”she says.

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