A Cottage All Grown Up

Beautifully imagined and carefully edited, the 1886 house is a Victorian Revival jewel box, all in 1700 square feet (and that includes the basement).

- Brian D. Coleman

In an 825-square-foot Victorian cottage in San Francisco, this married couple lived together quite peacefully. Twenty-five years into it, they decided to make over the daylight basement for a master bedroom, modestly adding on to accommodate an en-suite bathroom. This doubled their living space.

The downstairs is done in Stick Style splendor, its cherry paneling based on a similar 19th-century treatment in the Sanford-Covell House in Newport, Rhode Island.

In the beginning, the modest 19th-century cottage was all the homeowners could afford. It would just be a starter house, they told themselves—something to resell in a year or two. Built in 1886 by Scottish immigrant carpenter George Gray, it was an unassuming residence for his wife and four children and had remained in their family until 1964. The house had a colorful succession of subsequent owners. The second operated a short-lived pillow factory in the basement; when the third owner flipped the house, he felt so wealthy he moved to Paris!

Perched on a steep hillside, the cottage had been solidly built of thick, heart redwood inside and out. Little had been changed over the years; the hardware was original, as was the paneled wood dado in the parlor.

The cottage began to work its charm on the couple who bought it. They couldn’t resist embarking on a series of improvements, all of them in keeping with the home’s original Victorian design. In the 1950s, the exterior had been covered with white asbestos siding and the front door painted hot pink—so the first order of business was to remove the siding, strip the door, and repaint the redwood siding in its original earthy palette.

AESTHETIC SUITE