1920s Kitchen

I noticed a neat house recently with a rare feature - almost completely intact 1920s kitchen.  The house isn't a Sunset style house (it's actually not even a house; it's a building with two flats, one on each floor with a huge garage as the ground floor) but the floorplan and exterior and interior have similarity with Sunset style houses.  It's actually not even built in the 1920s; technically it was built in 1930 but the interior has much more in common with 1920s than 1930s houses.

Here's the listing:
http://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/3691-3693-17th-St-94114/home/709528

Check out the kitchen:


Why this is a rare feature is when house remodels happen, the first room to get remodeled majorly tends to be the kitchen. So it's quite rare to see a kitchen with original tiling, and even rarer to see a kitchen with original cabinets (it also comes with a very old stove):



I'm confident the cabinets are original because the few other 1920s houses I've seen with original kitchens also had similar looking cabinets with latches. When I opened and closed the cabinets, some of them didn't quite close properly, probably because they've been warped over time. Here's another view of the kitchen, from the adjoining breakfast room:



The third floor comes with a second cleaning area next to the kitchen:



The house also comes with a lot of other fascinating "original" features. I'm just afraid whoever will be buying this house will want to gut the interior (indeed, I heard at least two potential buyers at the open house talking about doing exactly that) without preserving most of the original features. Certainly it's possible to make this house modern and beautiful while preserving and fixing timeless features which are now showing wear due to age and lack of maintenance - the wood windows and original kitchen cabinets, for example. And indeed, given the rarity of some of the house's features, preserving them will only increase the house's value in the future.

The rest of the house is pretty neat as well. It's got an old fashioned split bath (toilet in one room, shower / bath / faucet in another) with nice tiling:



Both floors come with typical 1920s living room with sandstone brick fireplace, rounded ceiling with molding, wood windows, and built in cabinets. The second floor has elaborate diamond patterned wood flooring:



A close up of the wood windows overlooking 17th Street and Church Street (an amazing location right next to Dolores Park):



Here's a view from the third floor looking down at the roof of the sunroom on the second floor (only the second floor comes with a sunroom, which is only accessible from one of the bedrooms). It's got a tar and gravel roof, very similar to most houses in San Francisco with flat roofs. The back room also overlooks Mission High School.



In the hallway, there is a little telephone niche. The lighting looks old but not original (only one of the floors has it). It's funny to me that in today's age of portable cell phones, there was a past time period when someone thought it so important to be able to use the phone on a niche at night that they had a light installed.



The house has a huge garage. The entrance is tandem, but inside it you can fit two cars side by side, which makes this house very attractive than most houses in San Francisco which feature a fully tandem garage.



The house looks like it hasn't been updated in awhile. One thing I noticed is even though it is a soft-story building (aka the bottom floor is empty), it didn't look like there were any shear walls installed to help it withstand earthquakes. From my non-civil engineer set of eyes, the frame may not be securely fastened to the foundation (which according to the Association of Bay Area Governments would require certain sized bolts drilled into the frame into the foundation with certain sized square washers on top). More can be found here. What it currently looks like:



Finally, the exterior of the house seems very nice. It's the pink one with brick on the bottom floor:

Old 1920s Ingleside House with Shaped Parapet

I saw a nice old house today in the Ingleside with one of my favorite residential architectural features in San Francisco, the shaped parapet. The house is at: http://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/423-Faxon-Ave-94112/home/1584473 .

The shaped parapet is the decorative part of the front façade above the roof shingles. I just like it because I think it gives the house a special look of classical dignity, and also because this feature was particularly popular from about 1910 to about the mid 1920's (this house was built in 1926, probably one of the last years houses in San Francisco would be built with this feature). Shaped parapets became less popular after that, and it may possibly be a safety hazard (see http://www.sf-planning.org/modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=1105, search for "parapet").  

The house has what's called an English entrance. This means the front entrance to the house is downstairs (there are indoor stairs that then lead to the main floor upstairs) as opposed to other Sunset style homes where either there are completely outdoor stairs up front, or there is a covered but outdoor tunnel entrance that leads to stairs to the front entrance.

The floor plan is a very common floor plan popular in the 1920's; the flat I lived in for many years in the Inner Sunset had more or less the same plan (and looked similar too). It's got a nice classic 1920's living room with original windows with patterned muntins (decorative wooden strips; I had to ask my wife the proper term for this) in the upper sash, original fireplace, rounded ceiling with moldings, and built-in cabinets (though they have been painted over).

The dining room also has those same rounded ceilings.

There is one bedroom facing the front.

The kitchen is likely not original, but still is very old - judging from the wavy decorations and the wall tiling from the 1930's to the 1950's.

The tiny bathroom also has these wall tiles, but the big tiles are blue instead of white (blue seemed a more popular color in the 1950's, but I still can't date it with any certainty). 

Here's a close-up of the bathroom tiles.

There's a cute old telephone niche in the hallway.

Here's a look at the other bedroom (in the back), which leads to the sun room which is only accessible from this bedroom (which I find kind of weird and a bit of a waste of space since it would then be hard to use it as a third bedroom).

The sunroom does have nice views.

Spanish Influence in Sunset Style Homes

Saw a good example of a Spanish influenced Sunset style home show up on Redfin today:
http://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/710-43rd-Ave-94121/home/1563063?utm_source=myredfin

Within San Francisco, since roughly the 1910's, there had been homes built in a neo-Spanish style that harkens back to the days of Spanish missions in California. But most of those homes tended to be for the rich. Within San Francisco in the 1920's, for normal mass produced homes, the more typical style was Marina style with barrel front. Around 1929 to 1930, it finally became stylish for even these mass produced homes to show neo-Spanish or vaguely Mediterranean characteristics.

So this home is a good example of the first batch of mass-produced homes in San Francisco to show with this style, built in 1930 in the Outer Richmond:


Notice the overall exterior appearance is still a barrel front Marina style, harkening back to the 1920s, but there's some extra red tiling at the top along with the two little decorative triangular parapets on both sides.

The living room is very nice, with a barrel ceiling. The built-in cabinets next to the fireplace look very nice but not sure if they are really original.


My favorite part is the fireplace, which comes with a decorative tile showing what could be a California Spanish mission:


The dining room has a nice rounded ceiling:


Finally, looks like they've remodeled the downstairs with a bonus room. The steps look a bit narrow, and you can tell on the walls they've painted/plastered over the foundation) it bulges out from the walls, up to the small windows. And you can clearly see the pillars that support the original home in the middle. But still very nicely done for a bonus room.

1920s house

Here's your typical (nicer example) 1920's San Francisco row house on sale:

http://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/131-Ellsworth-St-94110/home/764220

Lots in San Francisco are very rectangular (much longer than wide). 

This house has bay windows in the front (typically 3 windows like this, or four or five windows with barrel front):

 

The living room is typically up front, with the bay windows out front, brick fireplace (typically sandstone, but in this case has been painted over) with built in shelving on both sides, moulding on the ceiling:



Older homes normally do not have open floor plans (at a time when central heating was not common/nascent) to preserve the heat.  Typically, behind the living room would be french doors leading to the dining room:

 

On the other side of the house would be a kitchen and bathroom, and in some cases a nook.  On the back the house would typically be two bedrooms side by side.  In bigger homes there might be a third home upstairs.

 

Unlike newer homes, the first floor for homes built up to the 1950's in San Francisco was typically originally built as a wide open unfinished basement, with tandem garage.  Some wealthier houses might have a finished "social room" in the first floor with fireplace and bar.  Nowadays, most San Francisco homes like this will have developed the first floor to add livable rooms.  For most of these houses, it should be possible to add one or two rooms plus bedroom and still retain the tandem garage.  In other cases, one or both spaces may have been developed into living space to make the living space even larger.  Personally, I like to live in a house with room to park two cars indoors.