WOOLWORTH
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Take a tour of four iconic NYC structures that went from derelict to dazzling.
By MATTHEW PHENIX
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Few homes epitomize Bay Area Shingle Style quite like the stuccoed residence at 428 Golden Gate Avenue, though there isn’t a shingle on it. The conspicuously Western discipline, better branded as First Bay Tradition, channeled not the New England Colonial influence of its East Coast counterpart but the conventions of California’s own ambient styles, a reactionary subduction of Beaux-Arts opulence by its very disciples — none more prolific than Willis Polk, a onetime agent of Daniel Burnham who pioneered the glass curtain wall and served as aesthete-in-chief for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
In 1893, the San Francisco architect accepted a seemingly modest $405, paid in seven installments, to design a most spectacular home cresting the southeast end of Belvedere Island in Marin County, then a budding residential community neighboring more built-up Tiburon. The client: Valentine Joseph Antoine Rey, son of Alsace-born printmaker Jacques Joseph Rey and sole heir to the Britton & Rey lithography fortune.
Polk landed the job at his creative peak, and the amalgam of sensibilities employed at Rey House reflect this period of awakening. He was among the earliest of his contemporaries to draw queues from Spanish Colonial architecture, preempting the Mission Revival movement to follow (and his personal restoration of San Francisco’s storied Mission Dolores). Belvedere’s Mediterranean terrain and climate, coupled with Mrs. Rey’s affinity for old Monterey, aligned in unison.
Envisioned as a villa on the North Bay’s own Riviera, the result was a rambling residence that follows the contour of the land with a series of split levels, unified by a grand staircase in a soaring light well. Framing this central hall are rounded arches in bays of 2 x 3, forming an arcade held aloft by wispy rows of Ionic columns—all milled from old growth clear-heart redwood. The almost illusory scale of this colossal interior focal point embellishes its proportions with effortless splendor, a dramatic contrast to the home’s comparatively simple exterior with no one dominant elevation.
That’s certainly not to say the home’s façade lacks character either. Straddling the single, rustic front door are two miniaturized interpretations of the famous rose window at San Antonio’s Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, and the lights illuminating them are near-carbon copies of prototypes from the same Texas basilica. Polk printed drawings for the fixtures in the inaugural issue of Architectural News, which he personally published.
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Northern California.
OVATION-WORTHY The townhouse boasts four bright bedrooms, a chef-ready kitchen, and ample entertaining space, including a private rooftop deck.
"People have told me they’ve been waiting to see inside this house for 25 years. There’s just so much history here."
RHAPSODY
IN redwood
BY E.J. KELLEY
Stepping inside, stucco and brown timber yields to unfettered redwood, easing from smooth planks buckled by contrasting-color butterfly joints to more contrived, elaborate manifestations. In some rooms, plaster or painted burlap walls break the ancestral hardwood. Others are slathered in it floor-to-ceiling, their varied grains casting contrasting hues as the thousand-year-old timbers bask in multidirectional light. Original hand-hammered iron hardware is still present, as are 12” tiles in a signature swirling design, custom-fired for the house and found thematically framing its robust hearths. The formal dining room retains two original pilastered built-in china cabinets with curving redwood muntins.
Each primary area of the home composes its own distinct level, broken by function and assembled in two perpendicular, asymmetric rectangles that maximize natural light. Some spaces draw brightness from the central hall, such as the living room and upstairs den. The first, a half-flight from the entry foyer, extends to a raised alcove in the two-story window bay, spanning across the water from the Market Street skyline to Angel island to the Golden Gate’s vermillion towers. The latter was crafted as a bespoke studio for Mrs. Rey, an award-winning oil painter who didn’t sell her work but was widely recognized in the Bay Area art world. It still boasts its bohemian westward-facing skylight window, evocative of the cozy, attic studios in Greenwich Village.
Marin’s Rey House, designed by Willis Polk in 1894, is a case study in First Bay vernacular by one of the movement’s most prominent architects.
The home remains remarkably original, though of course not without its alterations. A front arbor was added when Golden Gate Avenue first got paved. Gas laps yielded to electric ones when the island arrived fashionably late to the grid, and more recently, solar panels lessened its dependence on it. Lawrence Halprin, the modernist Olmsted who fancifully masterminded Sea Ranch on the Sonoma Coast, was enlisted to fashion a pool and terrace in the early ‘60s, which brought a re-contouring of the land that opened the lower level outside and transformed a seldom-used back porch into a butler’s pantry. A modern kitchen was fashioned by Warren Callister, a noted practitioner of Second Bay Tradition. And though a thorough restoration in the ‘70s returned the redwood, painted over by Britton Rey, to its au natural splendor, the original ceramic roof tiles, removed by the ‘50s, were not replaced. The property was listed on the National Register in 1983.
An enduring masterwork, the home’s fancifully absent singularity continues to inspire, and it stretches as desirable as a canvas for Bay Area living as there ever was. Polk’s narrative tells but one side of a story still being written. The next chapter is yours.
Raised on Russian Hill, Rey had lived but a short stroll from Polk’s San Francisco home and was undoubtedly acquainted with the architect's many commissions nearby. His father’s firm was founded during the Gold Rush and helped popularize California’s innate beauty to the masses, gaining a notoriety akin to Currier & Ives. Joseph Britton, the elder Rey’s business partner, was an early president of the Belvedere Land Company, which by 1892 had planted some 3,500 trees and commenced its raison d'être of subdividing this former island cow pasture of Rancho Corte Madera del Presidio. As one of the neighborhood’s first full-time residents, Rey quite literally had his pick of the lot, and selected one with unobstructed panoramas facing outward over San Francisco Bay, just shy of the cul-de-sac’s end bulb.
The Belvedere icon’s defining architectural feature: A central staircase in a soaring light well, unifying the home’s 3,502 square feet. The split-level layout includes four bedrooms and the skylit art studio where Mrs. Rey once painted under the pseudonym Nellie (or Helen) Lavery.
Precious old-growth redwood, clear cut by the turn of the 20th century, takes various forms in the living room, which includes a seven-foot-tall mantle of clear-heart timber. The wall sconces were originally gas lamps.
Panoramas at 428 Golden Gate Ave. span from Tiburon’s lagoon and hills, on one side, to San Francisco’s skyline on the other, with the bay’s twinkle in between.
Mark Machado, Corcoran Global Living
BY E.J. KELLEY
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