Painted Ladies

If Peter Maass, in "The Gingerbread Age" and "The Victorian Home in America," first made us truly aware of the glories of Victorian domestic architecture, it was Elizabeth Pomada who showed us how it could be brought to vivid life. In this, her first book about the modernizing-by-paint of 19th-Century houses, she concentrates on San Francisco, where the Painted Lady style was invented during the heyday of the hippies. The houses shown in the gorgeous full-color photographs range from the elegantly somber (like Don Parodi's many-bayed house on p. 23) to the minutely detailed (the imposing Colonial Revival mansion on p. 20 and the Bert Franklin rowhouse opposite) to the downright gaudy (Rhine & Kennedy's fire-engine-red offices on p. 29, a tiny lavender cottage on p. 50, a literally rainbow-striped confection on p. 69). If you can't make it to San Francisco in person--or if you've been, and want to relive the glories of its vintage housing--this book belongs on your shelf.