Architectural Housing Styles
San Francisco Stick
late 1870s — 1890s
The San Francisco Stick Style, as its title suggests, originated across the bay and Emphasizes straight lines and right angles. Flat, narrow boards are nailed to the Outside of the building to boldly repeat, and blithely reinforce, the structural skeleton beneath the clapboard skin. Diagonal braces, installed parallel to the facade instead of projecting from it, frame the porch. The roof projects over the front of the house so that the gable end forms a separate plane. Its composition of right triangles, incised with sunrays and starbursts, casts a shadow on the facade behind.
The structure of the San Francisco Stick house communicates lines and right angles in a more subtle way than the ornamentation does. A rectangular bay window, which also happened to be easier to construct, replaced the slanted bay window of its Italianate predecessor. The straight roofline of the earlier style was bent into a gable that creates the illusion that the sides are perpendicular. The horizontal siding is reoriented to vertical and diagonal positions, especially around the bay window where the structure is exaggerated by the board and batten technique. Furthermore, the square tower first appears.
At last, by the late 1870's, builders were treating wood as wood. For a decade before they had used wood as a medium to imitate stone in the adornment of Italianate houses. The two-dimensional design of the Stick decoration was a product of scrollsaw and jigsaw -- the same tools which intro-duced those intricately carved puzzles for Victorians' entertainment.
A decorative variation to the San Francisco Stick style, known as "Eastlake," carried the exploration of the properties of wood one step further to the three-dimensional. Knobs' and newels, turned out by chisel, lathe and gouge, and most closely resem-bling table legs, typify this architectural mode mistakenly named for British designer Charles Eastlake.
Excerpt from "Rehab Right - How to Rehabilitate Your Oakland House Without Sacrificing Architectural Assets"