The San Francisco Painted Ladies: Victorian Color and the Queen Anne Revival

Across from Alamo Square, in a row so famous it appears on postcards the world over, stand San Francisco's Painted Ladies — a line of Queen Anne Victorian houses, each painted in three or more vivid colors that embellish their gables, brackets, and bay windows. They are the most photographed houses in America, and they nearly did not survive at all.

According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painted_ladies), painted ladies are Victorian and Edwardian houses repainted, starting in the 1960s, in three or more colors that accentuate their architectural details — a term coined for San Francisco's Victorians by Morley Baer, Elizabeth Pomada, and Michael Larsen in their 1978 book *Painted Ladies: San Francisco's Resplendent Victorians*.

**A city of wood Victorians**

Approximately 48,000 houses in the Victorian and Edwardian styles were built in San Francisco between 1849 and 1915, many of them mass-produced wooden Queen Anne and Italianate homes erected during the post–Gold Rush boom. The great mansions of Nob Hill were largely destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, but thousands of the more modest wooden houses survived in the western and southern neighborhoods. During the world wars many were painted battleship gray with surplus Navy paint, and by the mid-twentieth century thousands had been demolished or stripped of their ornament.

**The colorist revolution**

In 1963, San Francisco artist Butch Kardum began combining intense blues and greens on the exterior of his Italianate Victorian. His neighbors were scandalized, then inspired, and a movement was born. Kardum and other colorists — Tony Canaletich, Bob Buckter, and others — transformed dozens of gray houses into painted ladies, and the process continues to this day.

**Postcard Row**

The best-known group is the row at 710–720 Steiner Street, built between 1892 and 1896 by developer Matthew Kavanaugh. They are strictly Queen Anne in style, with turrets, gables, and ornate detailing, each painted in a different polychrome scheme. As [Dunn-Edwards](https://www.dunnedwards.com/pros/blog/the-painted-ladies-of-san-francisco/) notes, the painted ladies catalyzed a wider interest in Victorian architecture and historic preservation that continues to this day.

**Why color matters**

The Painted Ladies are a lesson in the power of paint — the idea that color can restore a building's dignity and reveal the detail its designers intended. Victorian polychrome was historical; the modern painted ladies are not, but they rescued a building stock that had been allowed to decay, and proved that a coat of bold, considered color can be the most powerful act of preservation there is.

**References:**

- Painted ladies: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painted_ladies)

- The Painted Ladies of San Francisco: [Dunn-Edwards](https://www.dunnedwards.com/pros/blog/the-painted-ladies-of-san-francisco/)