San Francisco Pre-quake mansions as modern homes

Pre-quake mansions as modern homes
Victorian Alliance tour ventures inside houses spared in the 1906 fire
Susan Fornoff, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, October 14, 2006

This year's Victorian Alliance Home Tour brings a special bonus for the voyeurs setting foot in some of San Francisco's most glorious examples of Queen Anne, Italianate and Classical Revival architecture on Sunday.

The walk along the 1906 fire line in the Lafayette Park neighborhood offers a glimpse at how those beauties of the 1800s adapt to family life in the 2000s. And the answer from both the Simons on Franklin Street and the Brandt-Pierce family on Gough is "Very well, thank you," but in two entirely different tones, the Simons emphasizing restoration and Audrey Brandt espousing adaptation.

"We have a love of Asian design," said Brandt, who met her husband, Richard Pierce, when they were living in Japan. "When it comes to architecture and design, anything can be tastefully blended together, and a home should express your lifestyle and creativity. This expresses us."

"Us" includes 14-year-old Garrett, 11-year-old Adrianna, and Duncan, the family's English Lab. Like most families, they tend to congregate in the kitchen, which Brandt, an interior designer, redid in a very contemporary style before they moved in seven years ago.

The Jones-Schwabacher house, as it has come to be known, had been built in 1885 for $6,000 and presented to Beulah and Webster Jones as a wedding present from his father. After their divorce in 1899, Ludwig Schwabacher (co-founder of the Crown Paper Co.) bought the place; it stayed with the family for 46 years, through the 1906 earthquake and fire, which destroyed most of the city just east of the house and its two neighbors. By the time Brandt and Pierce bought it in 1999, it had been a boardinghouse and an investment property.

"We found some Victorian detail buried -- French doors hanging from molding, with the pocket doors hiding," Brandt said. "And the kitchen looked like it had been last renovated in the '70s, and it was really chopped up."

Brandt redesigned the space around cultured mahogany cabinetry with Asian-style geometric accents, and created three sitting areas -- a banquette in the corner where Brandt says everyone sits with their laptops in the evenings, an island in the center and a small desk along one of the walls.

She also designed a long table for the adjacent dining room that would easily seat 12 for the family's frequent parties. A step tansu in the corner combines with silk drapes and upholstery in celadon and sage for an elegant, Zen effect.

The master bedroom, with murals of Japan painted by Willem Racke and an intricate headboard designed by Brandt, has many Asian touches and the feeling of a retreat, while down the hall the red-walled family room is all about Africa.

"We spent three months in Egypt and Africa, and took the kids there in 2001," said Brandt, who chose a huge sectional to provide seating for TV viewing for the family and then filled the room with souvenirs. "I hand-carried many of these statues and artifacts home. It's a very warm room -- we like to hang out here."

Both children have large bedrooms -- Adrianna's will be on the tour, but Garrett's is on the off-limits third floor. In fact, none of the rooms in the four-story house is small and there isn't that typical Victorian dearth of closet space.

"I got lucky here -- I even took out a fur closet," Brandt said. "Now it's all about maintaining and upkeep. We did all of the electrical and plumbing, and the rest is just about painting and touch-ups. This isn't like construction today; it was really well done."

The Simons second that sentiment, figuring there's not much that could destroy a house that survived two earthquakes and a fire and has since been re-engineered to withstand even more.

But they've decorated in period style, with Oriental rugs, hand-carved armoires and marble bathrooms.

"The Realtor said don't buy it, it's a historic landmark," Tim Simon said of the 9,000-square-foot mansion he and his wife, Ann, bought in January 2004. "But we want to keep it like it was. Everything we've done, we've gone to great lengths to make sure it fit the spirit of the house."

Tim and Ann are overjoyed to live in the sprawling landmark known as the Coleman House. He loves the history of the place -- it was built in 1895 for Edward Coleman and saved in 1906, legend goes, by a firefighter who kept Gen. Frederick Funston from detonating dynamite underneath it to expand the fire defense line. And Ann loves the location, "in the fishbowl," as tour publicist Stephen Haigh puts it, of a busy corner in walking distance of Union Square to the south and Fisherman's Wharf to the north.

"It was so loud here," she said, "that the first thing we had to do was put in quiet windows."

With the windows and three children (15-year-old Ben, 3-year-old Sabrina and 10-month-old Theo) to mask the street noise, the couple barely hears a horn toot anymore. They've even lost each other in the house, which will have 10 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms when its renovation is complete in two more years. It also has seven fireplaces, and marble sinks in most of the rooms on its four floors.

"We had to call each other on cell phones and ask, 'Where are you?' " Ann said.

The Simons are only the second family to call the house home; after the Colemans died off, it had incarnations as a "1960s rock 'n' roll flophouse," Tim said, and, starting in the 1970s, a law firm.

Five law firms had to vacate when they moved in -- after replacing the plumbing, heating and electrical systems, as Brandt had done up on Gough. The law firms didn't have a kitchen; one has been installed in the basement, but Ann, a former florist and decorator, is still working on the design for the permanent first-floor kitchen.

It will, she promises, have lots of dark wood and carvings with its new modern appliances. Guido Tevini's woodwork and Bruce Getty's chandelier restorations already have enhanced the period feel in many of the rooms, and the family has had a lot of fun with the talented decorative artists Christel Heinelt and Thaddeus Warren of Lushart, creating an upstairs playroom for adults that has playing cards painted on the walls and a faux roulette wheel encircling the chandelier.

The children all have playrooms, each floor has a laundry, and still the unpretentious Simons don't quite know what to do with all of their rooms. "It's a party house," said Ann, who specializes in holiday decorations and has scaried-up the entrance and parlor for Halloween.

But even with a giant pumpkin on the roof and a big spider entangled on the front porch, the Simons don't get many trick-or-treaters on Halloween. "The worst thing about living here is the lack of children in the city," Tim said.

That's probably partly because it's so hard to imagine there's a family living behind the front door of what looks like a monument to times gone by. Maybe Sunday's tour takers, having seen how the past merges with the present, will send some kids by in a couple of weeks.

PHOTO TOUR:

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