Victorian Glory in San Francisco and the Bay Area

I attended college in the Bay Area in the early `60s and have been nostalgically in love with San Francisco and Marin ever since. I spent many, many hours hiking around the city with a couple of friends, climbing the hills, exploring narrow passages between buildings, and generally gawking at the 19th century architecture. I also knew a girl whose grandmother (or aunt, or something) lived in one of the "Painted Ladies" on Alamo Square, the strip now known as "Postcard Row," so I actually got to see the inside of one of the gorgeous homes detailed and depicted in this book. If you're not from there, you likely lump together all of San Francisco's historic domestic architecture as "Victorian" -- but you would be wrong. There's Gothic Revival, Italianate, Second Empire, Stick Style, Shingle Style, Queen Anne, and Colonial Revival, plus various hybrids among and later additions to all of those. Duchscherer is a longtime resident of the city and a highly regarded architectural historian and he leads the reader through the art and business behind these homes, while Keister's lush photography of busy (and occasionally overdone) Victorian interiors will have you drooling on the page. One of my personal favorites is the Westerfeld House in the Western Addition, built in 1889, which includes a fifth floor (!) tower room with an amazing view. Another is Falkirk (originally the Robert Dollar Mansion), built in San Rafael in 1888, a much more rambling Tudor extravaganza filled with a king's ransom in paneling and wainscotting; it was saved from demolition and entirely renovated (thank God) after I left the area, and I shall have to go and visit it the next time I get out there. What a book!

This survey of Victorian beauties of California's San Francisco Bay Area provides a blend of regional history and architectural insights, surveying the changing Victorian house styles of the region and featuring a wealth of fine color examples. From architectural roots to hybrid styles, Book Of The Courtesans is packed with detail.