Noe Valley’s former Engine No. 44 firehouse — later an artist’s studio and now a sprawling home — just sold for $5.8 million.
The original fire pole remains, but it’s encased behind glass upstairs in the four-story home at 3816 22nd St. Well, five if you count the watchtower loft.
You can still grasp onto that piece of history on the ground floor just behind the original zinc-coated doors, though a 2007 renovation transformed the 6,300-square-foot, five-bedroom property with modern features: an elevator, spiral and more traditional center staircases, and a separate garden studio.
Still, traditional is just about the last word you’d use to describe this 116-year-old property.
The primary suite, which occupies the entire fourth floor, has a glass catwalk to connect the bedroom, bath, and a roof deck.
Then there’s the open-concept art gallery and library around the central lightwell on the third floor, which has three bedrooms, two side-by-side washer dryers, and two rear decks.
After it was decommissioned as a firehouse in 1959, the property sold at auction to printmaker Beth Van Hoesen and her husband, Mark Adams, known for his tapestries, stained glass, and watercolors. They lived and worked there for 46 years, holding weekly drawing meetings that included luminaries like Wayne Thiebaud and Ruth Asawa. Asawa depicted the home in her San Francisco Fountain near Union Square, which is intricately detailed with city landmarks.
The buyers, a married couple in tech, were at Rosh Hashanah services at Temple Emanu-el — where Adams designed the main sanctuary’s dramatic stained glass windows — when the sale closed last week, according to their agent, Priya Agrawal of Rivet Real Estate.
It was their third time bidding on the property, she said, and it proved to be the charm.
“For both them and the seller, it took more time for there to be a meeting of the minds,” she said. The sales price came in $400,000 below the most recent asking price of $6.2 million and more than $2 million lower than the initial $7.9 million listing price last year.
Compass agent Steve Mavromihalis got the listing this summer and received one competing offer. To drum up interest, he lowered the price and leaned into the whimsy of the property, quoting in the marketing materials from “Alice in Wonderland” and Robert Frost’s “The Road Less Traveled.”
His take: Why bother pretending this is a typical Noe Valley row house? Let’s find someone who’ll fall in love at first sight.
“Ninety percent of the public looks at it as an odd duck,” said Mavromihalis, who grew up four blocks away. “That’s not my audience.”
The tactic seemed to resonate with the buyers, who were previously living in a townhome that had enough space but was missing something undefinable. They were enamored with the open and airy spaces, according to their agent, although the central staircase felt like something out of M.C. Escher. They have immediate baby-proofing plans for the main stairs but figure that the nontraditional layout provides flexibility, light, and a lot more square footage than other homes in the neighborhood at the same price.
What gave them pause initially was that they seemed to be the only ones to realize the home’s potential.
“Both my clients and I were like, ‘Why is no one else writing an offer on this house? Like, what is it that we’re seeing that other people are not?’” said Agrawal. “It takes a few trips to really wrap your head around it, and then it actually feels really nice and normal.”
The fire pole is definitely staying, she added, but so will the safety glass.