Welcome to The Looker, a column about design and style from San Francisco Standard editor-at-large Erin Feher.
“You walk in here, and you either love it or you hate it,” Donald Sambucci says of the house at 1824 Green St. Regardless of which camp you fall into, I challenge anyone to cross the threshold without audibly gasping.
Nothing is as expected. The off-white concrete walls of the living room seem to pulse and undulate, their textured, wavy pattern suggesting something magical lurking just below the surface, trying to push through. The buxom folds of the spiral staircase, sculpted from the same material, recall the coiled tail of an ancient reptile. Visitors have said it feels like stepping inside the winning creation at an ambitious sandcastle competition.
In his 50 years as a real estate agent specializing in high-end San Francisco houses, Sambucci had never seen anything like this home, which is on the market for the first time in 30 years.
The uniqueness makes it a tricky sell. To design buffs, 1824 Green St. is a rare and valuable find — one of the few surviving interiors by the late San Francisco designer Robert Hutchinson. But to someone trying to sell a $4.5 million time capsule when most home buyers are besotted with Scandinavian minimalism, it’s kind of a pain in the ass.
“A lot of people just come by because they want to see the design,” says Sambucci. The property has been on the market for three months without any serious offers.
But it’s a history worth preserving. The structure was built in 1880. Though you would never guess it now, it started life as a classic Victorian, complete with ornate moldings, traditional bay windows, and the standard layout of a long hallway opening to a warren of small rooms.
Hutchinson transformed it 100 years later. His client had grown up in the home, and when it became hers, she was determined to turn it into something new.
She hired Hutchinson, who had hitchhiked to San Francisco from Louisiana at age 18 and enrolled in the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design in North Beach. He quickly established himself as an artist and interior designer, using his first sizable commission to purchase a live-work building on Sutter Street at age 23. By the time he was hired by the owners of 1824 Green St., in 1980, his reputation allowed him to set audacious ground rules for the project: He would take it on only if the client gave him carte blanche to execute his daring vision, from the interior architecture to the art to the furnishings.
The client agreed. In a move that today would likely not make it beyond the first permit request, Hutchinson dismantled the 100-year-old Victorian, removing the “front, back, roof, all interior walls and the staircase.”
“We saved one side wall,” he told Interior Design magazine.
What was built in its place is surprisingly nondescript from the outside. A two-story bank of angular, weather-worn windows hints at the renovation’s 1980 execution. But nothing prepares you for what’s inside.
While the sculptural walls and stair make the boldest first impression, other notable details quickly reveal themselves. Walls and floors paneled in honey-colored oak are foils to the creamy concrete. Despite the windowless side walls, light pours in from above. A glassed-in lightwell filled with mature ferns creates a glowing vitrine, reflecting beams of light across the dining room. Sunlight seems to tumble down the staircase like a waterfall, thanks to a massive skylight.
Many of the cabinets and sideboards are built in, including a wet bar below a wall punctured with more than 50 terra-cotta lined cubbies. Hutchinson’s 45-year-old, analog, temperature-controlled wine storage solution looks far cooler than any luxe fridge on the market today.
The commitment to craftsmanship and detail continues in the kitchen, where custom flat-front cabinetry features a brass and stainless steel trim that carries through to the dramatic triangle window and door, each framing a segment of the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. Minimal modernizations could retain the style and craftsmanship, while ushering the kitchen into the present.
The same is true for the bathrooms, which feature custom cedar vanities. The primary bath wraps around the second story of the lightwell, drenching it in sunlight that bounces infinitely off a bank of mirrored closets. The glass-walled shower stall is playfully paired with the transparent shaft of the lightwell and offers a peek down into the dining room (and vice versa). A deep, Japanese-style soaking tub has a retro feel, but the size and placement makes far more design sense than the massive floating showpieces now in vogue.
The current owners bought the house in 1995 and kept Hutchinson’s vision intact. “The owners would love for somebody to walk in and love it like they did,” says Sambucci. “But I think our bottom line is, well, you know …”
It will be hard to find devoted Hutchinson enthusiasts. Though he had a prolific career, and his projects regularly graced the pages of Architectural Digest, he was never well-known outside the Bay Area. His final project was a Nob Hill condo for the socialites John and Susan Manoyan, which he finished a few months before his death in 2008. The current state of those interiors is unknown.
Though he may be largely forgotten even in the SF design scene, Hutchinson’s fingerprints can be spotted in lower Nob Hill, at his longtime residence at 1232 Sutter St. The home’s sand-colored plaster exterior was hand-troweled with soft edges to resemble a Moorish mud hut, with a sculptural wave cresting down the center.
Hutchinson lived in the building until his death. The ever-changing interior functioned as his design laboratory, but its most daring incarnations exist now only in photos. The current owners, Hutchinson’s widower and his partner, occasionally rent the unit on VRBO, plugging its pedigree and noting that few custom Hutchinson designs remain.
And for now, 1824 Green St. may well be the last. Here’s hoping this avant-garde sandcastle doesn’t get washed away.