• 3203 Pacific St. house
• Dickinson house
• Horatio Livermore house
• Batten house
• Mrs Virgil Williams-W. J. Polk house
• Katherine Atkins house
• William Joliffe house
• Villa Veneta, John Kilgarif house
• Valentine J. A. Rey house
• Frank Washington house
• Abbreviations

This steep block is an architectural treasure trove. Nowhere else in the city is there such a harmonious stand of houses from what has been termed the First Bay Tradition, a west coast "Shingle style" that mixes elegance of detail with informality in materials and form--don't miss the back side for real vernacular informality. The designers' names are a roster of the turn-of-the-century group of eastern immigrants who brought forth a first flowering of regional design (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 97-98).

Bruce Porter, Polk's artist friend, ... had a hand in designing 3203 Pacific, across the street from this wedge-shaped row [3232 and 3234 Pacific]. Eli Sheppard, owner of the House of the Flag on Russian Hill, built this house as a wedding present for his daughter. When the engagement was broken, Sheppard sold the house to Bruce Porter, who in turn commissioned Willis Polk to remodel it. Polk changed the entire structure while maintaining its rustic appearance. Later Sheppard's daughter became Mrs. William Hilbert, and with the help of Bruce Porter designed her own rustic house at 3343 Pacific. Bernard Maybeck designed 3233 Pacific a few years later. This block of houses facing one another across Pacific Avenue is one of the most arresting areas in San Francisco. Most of the houses predate the 1906 fire, and thus dramatically mark the end of the eclectic Queen Anne style, dominant in San Francisco architecture until the turn of the century (Alexander and Heig 2002: 336-37).

At the corner, 3203 Pacific Avenue, is the house designed and built in 1902 by E. T. Sheppard, a retired diplomat, as a wedding present to his daughter. The engagement was broken and Sheppard sold the house to the Porters, who commissioned Willis Polk to enlarge and remodel it. Polk moved the entrance around to the Pacific Avenue side, jacked up the house and added a full story underneath--and otherwise completely remade it.

The resulting three-story house has floor-to-ceiling windows and two decks, one of them off the dining room. The front door is particularly noteworthy, with its broken pediment and urn-shaped finial over which is placed a small arched window with its own balustrade, wrought iron grill, and pediment (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 144, 145).

Straight ahead of you as you start around the sharp curve that brings you down into Sausalito, this dark shingle box is one of the oldest houses in town. A little beyond it on the left at 215 South Street is a Victorian Gothic cottage that is at least twenty years older (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 218).

"Craig Hazel": Possibly designed by Willis Polk, this house was originally located on part of the Harrison tract. It has a distinctive rippled roof (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 321).

The Livermore house on the back of the lot at 1045 Vallejo dates from 1865. Willis Polk remodeled it c. 1891, and Robert A. M. Stern designed significant additions and alterations in 1990—the entrance is now on Florence (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 67).

[Polk] advised Horatio Livermore, a rich Oakland businessman, to remodel an adjacent house in a manner that avoided any reference to formality.¹⁹ Livermore and other residents devised yards with much the same unaffected, rural character as the Atkinson property. In little more than a decade, Russian Hill had become "a veritable wilderness" rising amid San Francisco's dense urban fabric (Fig. 72). Reached by long flights of steps and narrow paths, with plants growing over everythng in sight, the compound conveyed a sense of age, even slight decay. Its cultivated rusticity, laced with urbane counterpoints, suggested an old, remote, somewhat neglected residential quarter on the fringe of a European city rather than a pastoral retreat. The arrival of the Livermores and other socially prominent families signified that this setting now appealed to the well-to-do, as well as to artists and others of limited means. Russian Hill's character remained an anomaly only in degree; it had a considerable influence on new work in other parts of the metropolis (Longstreth 1998: 126-27).

Horatio Livermore had Polk design a set of ramps, stairs, and balustrade for the Jones Street approach to the block. Horatio Livermore's wife told her grandson, George, that Polk had been involved with the ca. 1897 alterations to the family house; however, photographs of work done at that time suggest that neither Polk nor any other architect actually designed the changes. Instead, he probably served as an informal consultant. Polk was responsible for alterations made ca. 1891 for himself and his family prior to construction of their own residence next door. See Overland Monthly, May 1893, p. 460, for an illustration (Longstreth 1998: 376 n.19).

In 1890, Willis Polk rented the Livermore House (7) (1865) at 1045 Vallejo, which is secluded behind trees just south of the corner of Florence and Vallejo. Having become a friend of Worcester's, Polk remodeled the entryway and living room of the Livermore House in late 1890 and early 1891 in a manner similar to Worcester's. (Robert stern remodeled and added to the Livermore House in 1990.) (Wiley 2000: 257-58).

After arriving in San Francisco, the mercurial Willis Polk quickly tired of working for others, Brown included, and set out to start his own firm in 1890 at the age of 23. After a lackluster first year, Polk decided to make a name for himself in San Francisco by starting an architectural periodical, entitled Architectural News. Although the periodical folded after the third issue, its steady fare of often-acerbic criticism of the Establishment architects in San Francisco and their Victorian confections won him a considerable amount of praise and notoriety, especially from the city's bohemian set. After meeting local business magnate and Russian Hill property owner Horatio P. Livermore, Willis Polk moved to leased quarters in Livermore's vacant residence at 1023 Vallejo Street (now 40 Florence Street) in 1891. Polk quickly set to work remodeling the interior of the already much altered house originally built in 1854 by contractor David Morrison. Polk's remodel of the first floor soon attracted the attention of San Francisco's high society for its grace and avoidance of cheap Victorian frippery. Polk soon began to attract a social circle to events at 1023 Vallejo, including other rising architects such as Ernest Coxhead and John Galen Howard (Christopher VerPlanck. nd. Architectural Series: Russian Hill. California Apartment Association).

The Horatio P. Livermore home, at 1045 Vallejo Street and 40-42 Florence Street, is a grand shingled house built around 1860, and later remodeled by Willis Polk. At the height of its glory this country house on the highest nob of Russian Hill was situated on an exceptionally large lot, planted with fruit trees to provide a park-like setting (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 49).

A study in the subtle manipulation of facade elements to create balanced asymmetry (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 100).

One of Polk's earliest buildings in the Bay Area is the 1891 Batten house. The image, like that of two houses which Polk worked on while in Coxhead's office in Los Angeles, is strongly Queen Anne/Colonial Revival. But the elements have been played with, distorted. The tiny dormer in the large, slightly splayed roof plane and the non-corresponding sizes of the superimposed bays foretell mannerist tendencies which Polk would soon explore. Spatially too, the house is prophetic: the circulation and stair areas are combined in a slice of space which pierces all levels of the house, creating a spatial variety which would normally be associated with a house of considerably larger scope (Beach 1988: 56, 57).

A landmark of the Second Bay Region Tradition is the Polk-Williams house... Willis Polk designed it for his family, which, at the time it was built in 1892, included his father, mother, brother, and wife. The client for this double house was a painter, Mrs. Virgil Williams, whose husband had founded the California Institute of Design. Polk apparently waived the commission in exchange for the eastern frontage of the lot. The shingled facade does not divide neatly in two parts, but rather suggests a street row in a medieval village. The old saw about the house with the Queen Anne front and the Mary Ann behind fits well here. The back tumbles down the hillside, taking advantage of the slope to add layers of space. Polk's studio was on a lower rear level. The interior of the house is a remarkable sequence of vertically organized spaces (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 67-68).

An integration of these influences [postmedieval vernacular dwellings in northern French and English towns and classical sources as well] was first achieved by Polk in a double house on Russian Hill (1892) directly across from Worcester's cottage. The commission initially came from Mrs. Virgil Williams, a painter, whose husband had founded the California Institute of Design and who was herself a prominent figure in the local artistic community. Her property, which contained a change in elevation approximately equal to its width of 44 feet, had long been considered an impossible site for a building. Polk accepted the challenge, convincing his client that a party-wall house with two units could be erected on the premises, and reputedly waived payment to secure the eastern 20-foot frontage for his family. Polk's parents purchased the property, financed the work, and may well have taken charge of building the entire complex.

The front elevation of the Williams-Polk house is treated as a single residence (Fig. 62). The Williams (west) side is dominant; the Polks' unit has fewer and smaller elements, and a front door that is tucked beneath an understated secondary entrance. Bands of simple casement windows stretch across both sections at a uniform height, concealing the actual difference in floor levels of about 3 feet between the two apartments. With all its elements unified and at a tiny scale, the house appears considerably larger than its actual size. The facade is like a condensed Norman streetscape, and its picturesqueness is accentuated in a seemingly casual manner, almost as if it were a stage set (Fig. 63). This playful, mannered quality is balanced by the taut, rectilinear articulation and reductive simplicity of its elements, aspects that are similar to recent English work, especially that of Charles Voysey.

There was no obvious precedent for the house's six-story rear portion (Fig. 64). Polk designed it as a loose piling of masses, with balconies and terraces, suggesting an accumulation of hillside shacks. The reference here is to the mid-nineteenth-century houses clustered on the slopes of Telegraph Hill and other promontories, which had been favored haunts of artists for several decades. The composition particularly recalls a block of cottages on Pine Street erected by the Austrian consul, Edmund Vischer, where he maintained a studio and published his famous Pictorial California (1870) (Fig. 65). Considered to be among San Francisco's "most romantic retreat[s]," the complex sheltered a small colony of writers, painters, and diplomats. Beyond the street lay interior courts with lush, unkempt gardens reached by narrow, stepped passages—it was "a veritable wilderness," now tenuously perched at the edge of the expanding commercial center.¹⁷ Polk's design proclaimed Russian Hill's growing prominence as a Bohemian enclave, with this new house as the dominant landmark (Longstreth 1998: 117-21).

Willis Polk's own home was the romantic shingled house just beyond the circle at 1013-1015-1017 Vallejo street. It is said that when Mrs. Virgil Williams commissioned her house in 1892, Polk agreed to do the job for the eastern twenty feet of the sixty-foot lot. The result was two houses under one roof--the Williams house, 1019 Vallejo Street, being the larger, western portion of what appears to be a single building. Polk's house was much bigger than it appears, as the hill drops off so steeply that it is seven stories high in the rear. It would also seem that Polk got the better part of the bargain so far as the view was concerned (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 49).

Though generally more staid and "respectable," Coxhead's contemporaries Willis Polk and A. C. Schweinfurt often used a similar rich and contradictory visual vocabulary in their buildings of the late 1890's. Polk's own house in Russian Hill in San Francisco (1892, actually a double house) represented another case of miniaturization (Woodbridge 1988: 10, 12).

In 1892 Polk built a double house for Mrs. Virgil Williams. Mrs. Williams, a San Francisco artist, had her studio and living quarters in one half of the building; Polk and his family lived in the other half. The house climbs an impossibly steep site on Russian Hill: it is three stories high in the front; six at the back. The street facade is respectable enough: "quaint," in the language of the time, with elements rather loosely adapted from the medieval vernacular. The rear shows a playful, joyous acceptance of the visual and material elements of San Francisco's hillside shacks. It is difficult to reconstruct its original interior configurations exactly; it has been altered considerably through the years. But in the upper levels of the house it is still possible to experience the complex vertical interlocking of the living spaces (Woodbridge 1988: 57, 58-61).

Polk orchestrated the play between contrasting qualities in a somewhat different manner in the alterations he designed in 1893 for a small Italianate cottage situated on an adjacent property. The owner, Katherine Atkinson, was Gelett Burgess's cousin and a well-known supporter of local literary efforts. For several decades her house had been a favorite gathering place among artists, writers, and kindred spirits. Polk's remodeling was modest, yet it resulted in a major transformation by making a small house seem grand, with discrete spaces that are simultaneously integral parts in a circuitous sequence. Each room is tiny and is adorned with classical details in redwood--scaled to acknowledge the diminutive confines while imparting the elegance of an English country house. Thresholds are placed at the corners, enhancing a sense of spatial continuity. No terminating focus exists at either end of this sequence. In the hall a stair winds up to the second floor through a tiny arcade, and in the dining room an oversized fireplace, medieval in character, is set off to one side, abutting a dark passage to the pantry and a china cabinet that is the most sumptuous appointment in the house.

The plain, unpretentious exterior of the Atkinson house was left virtually intact. Polk admired the straightforward simplicity of such buildings, and his client valued her cottage's historical associations. He designed a plaque commemorating Atkinson's parents as the builders and bearing the date of construction (1853) to be placed over the front door, omitting any reference to the alterations. At about the same time, Bruce Porter probably designed the informal garden, enclosing the yard with an assortment of trees and thick shrubs. A classical balustrade and a delicately rendered wrought-iron gate separated this verdant enclave from the street. The total effect imparts a sense of both ordered elegance and elements that had been accumulated over time (Longstreth 1998: 125-26).

In 1853, a contractor, Joseph Atkinson, built an ell-shaped house near the site of the observation tower, on the eastern slope of Broadway. With its low-pitched roof, wide overhanging eaves, and bay windows, it was the perfect embodiment of the new Italian Villa style. Over the front door he placed a lintel bearing the date of construction, 1853. It is still there.

In 1893 the house suffered considerable damage from a fire. Atkinson's daughter, Katherine, commissioned the young architect Willis Polk to rebuild the house in a style in keeping with the spirit of the mellow old place. No more suitable architect for such a project could have been found anywhere. Polk, who lived just a stone's throw away, was the perfect choice. He left the exterior largely untouched, but redesigned the interior to add a feeling of spaciousness without detracting from its many warm historic associations. Here, in one of San Francisco's oldest dwellings, Polk managed to impart the rustic charm of the "countrified" city house, a style which he established in San Francisco. ... Bruce Porter, another talented young designer, did the landscaping, which remains to complement the old house (Alexander and Heig 2002: 107).

On the steep hillside at 1032 Broadway is a house built by James Atkinson in about 1853. Originally a frame Italian villa, it was extensively remodeled by Willis Polk in 1900 (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 49).

The Polks [W.W. Polk, Daniel Polk, Willis Polk] acted as general contractors for the San Francisco houses of Adam Grant and William Joliffe (Longstreth 1998: 372, n. 13).

Willis Polk designed this Period residence. The overhangs of each story, molded brackets and grouped casements are specific expressions of Tudor Revival (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 284).

Several of Polk's commissions during the first half of the 1890s were for houses in Marin County. The year-round residence of a San Francisco insurance broker, John Kilgarif (1893) is a good example of his freewheeling play with divergent elements. On the main elevation, an overscaled entrance portal, decked in Venetian Gothic tracery, is placed right at the edge of the block. The second-story windows form a symmetrical grouping, even though it is neither centrally placed nor aligned with the components beneath. What appears to be a service wing on one side actually contains the living room, the grandest space in the house. The ambiguity continues in the plan. As a diagram, it forms a rectangle, evenly divided into three parts with the entrance on center; however, each section is set progressively further back, creating a diagonal spatial sequence ascending to the living room. At this point, the ceremonious passage clulminates in a barrel-vaulted space. Here, the walls are punctured by windows that are too big and peel back at the entry to form a low, shallow alcove that opens onto a terrace and reveals a panoramic view of the Bay (Longstreth 1998: 163).

An equally spirited hillside residence was designed for Valentine Rey in Belvedere (1893). Like Murdock, Rey was a businessman with a keen interest in the arts. He was being groomed to head the family firm, Britton and Rey, preeminent among the region's photography and lithography studios. Through its prints, the company deserved much of the credit for making the beauties of northern California's landscape well known during the late nineteenth century. Rey had grown up in a Victorian cottage on Russian Hill not far from Polk's house, and his familiarity with the architects's work there may well have led to the commission. Rey was also one of the earliest full-time residents of Belvedere and an ardent supporter of its rustic development. Rey's wife was a painter who had studied under William Keith, and she also had a love for the region's natural scenery and its early Hispanic architecture.

Located on a superb site, originally with an unbroken view in all directions, the Rey house is without defined front, side, or rear elevations. a dual approach from above and below terminates at the small entry terrace, shielded by a pergola, which modestly punctuates the low, dense foliage. The house follows the slope of the land and is arranged on split levels, a configuration that is expressed on the exterior as two distinct masses casually joined. Its picturesque form, low profile, plain stucco wall surfaces, and red tile roof all suggest vernacular farmhouses in Spain and Italy, sources that were just beginning to interest American architects. The projecting porch makes an unprecedented reference to buildings of the Mexican-American period in Monterey, for which Mrs. Rey had a particular fondness. The freedom with which these sources are interpreted--reduced to simple, geometric forms and softened by trellises and vines--is similar to Irving Gill's work of some fifteen years later. At the same time, the Rey house is thoroughly eclectic, orchestrating diverse allusions in a complex, yet loose, pictorial assemblage. Polk's intentions are revealed overtly at the front door, which is flanked by two cartoons of Pedro Huizar's baptistry window at the Mission San José in San Antonio, Texas, whimiscally reduced to the scale of toys. Their ironic context is accentuated both by repetition and by the fact that one of them is merely a blind relief.

These tiny sculptures offer little preparation for the interior, where interconnecting spaces are embellished with rich classical details. In plan, the organization appears jumbled; in three dimensions, however, it is among Polk's most dramatic interiors. As with the Murdock house, the main rooms are arranged around a central core that combines stair and hall. Here, the area circumscribes a tiny light well enframed by an attenuated arcade that caricatures the court of a quattrocento palace. In contrast to the linear progression of space in the Kilgarif house, the organization is centripetal, with the light well acting both as a screen and as a means of visual communication between the main rooms. Each space rests at a different level and is its own miniature world: the living room suggests a baronial hall; the family room above, a rustic mountain lodge; the master bedroom, a tower chamber. A dialogue is thus established between the characteristically English use of contrasting spaces to create a sequence offering surprise and delight and the American sense of spatial freedom and continuity (Longstreth 1998: 163-66).

Certainly one of the most aesthetically satisfying homes on Belvedere is the former Valentine Rey home at 428 Golden Gate Avenue. Built in 1893 (and perhaps the fourth house constructed on the island), the residence was the result of an especially happy collaboration between artist, Mrs. Valentine Rey, and architect, Willis Polk. Their concern was to make the house a work of art. A central lightwell became the heart of the structure; and the house surrounding it was constructed of hand-sized and carved redwood--a standard practice of the time.

Not at all standard, however, are the strong Mediterranean qualities that the designers incorporated--revealed in the use of arches, tiled fireplaces, tiled roof, and stucco as the exterior material. The interior of the house is marked by spaciousness, most dramatically illustrated by the second-story family room--in reality an attic space--in which exposed redwood beams, redwood paneling, and a simple stone fireplace are used to great advantage. Overall, the design of the house is a perfect balance, its elegant lines giving it a character that is forever contemporary (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 218).

An 1893 Polk house and one of Coxhead's designs of 1892 present an interesting series of similarities and contrasts. Coxhead's Murdock house is a San Francisco townhouse clothed in the form and materials of a rustic vernacular. Polk's Rey house climbs a wooded hill in suburban Belvedere but is as tightly packed and introspective as an urban house. Both houses use a vernacular mode as a background for and contrast to specific pieces adapted from high-art European architectural history: but where Coxhead chose the carpenter's wood-frame vernacular, the Rey house references the wood and adobe buildings of early Anglo Monterey. Each house is a series of staggered-level platforms stacked around a stairwell. But where the Rey house is an open, constantly changing spatial progression (a perfect example of the stair-become-a-house), the Murdock house is a series of separate compartments (Woodbridge 1988: 57, 60, 64-65, 67).

Extant; altered (Longstreth 1998: 430).

Abbreviations