Purchased as a 2,350 square foot two-unit building for $1,335,000 in September 2010 with permits in place to add a new ground and third floor and expand a bit in-between, 111 Liberty Street has quietly (so far) returned as a 4,700 square foot Liberty Hill home.
With high ceilings and contemporary finishes throughout, and a legal one-bedroom below (click floor plan above to enlarge), 111 Liberty is soon to be listed seeking $4,995,000.
∙ Listing: 111 Liberty (5/4.5) – $4,995,000 [111liberty.com]
Saw it under construction, tight layout, towering building next door make the yard not that nice. View only from top floor. Probably the worst block on Liberty, down low.
Overpriced, IMO. I’d take at least a million off. Probably more.
Beautiful place. HUGE price. I wonder if it’s possible, even with the Facebook IPO. 🙂
Two design details caught my eye, and I’ll confine my nitpicking to that:
1. It made me laugh to see a “mud room” listed in the photos. The builder or architect must be from a winter climate, because it doesn’t compute culturally with SF.
2. I totally don’t get using glass in the garden railings. I see where the designer wants transparency to see the plantings, but the glass is going to get dirty immediately and require constant cleaning to look decent. A simple wire detail would have worked better.
“It made me laugh to see a “mud room” listed in the photos. The builder or architect must be from a winter climate, because it doesn’t compute culturally with SF.”
…he says as the rain pours down
I take it you are not out walking the dog today…
Price seems high. Good luck. It wouldn’t be the first time I was surprised by a top end flip.
Mud rooms rock.
+1 for mud rooms.
I love mud rooms. But growing up in New England, I know how desperately needed they are anywhere there is snow and slush. In SF you need an umbrella stand and a place to wipe your feet, max.
Remove the glass railings after the plants have established themselves. My guess is the architect did not intend to have the railings, but the inspector required them – a bit of a grey area in the code.
Oh, and btw the “mud room” in photo 42 doesn’t show on the plans…I assume it’s just a corner of the garage. Okay…I’m done with mud rooms! 🙂
I’ll guess Midwest, judging by the game in the back yard.
The jokes about the price and the game sort of write themselves.
I have a mudroom and its great… especially coming in the house with a wet dog.
I love seeing these Victorian remodels because every architect/designer/contractor has a unique way of making them livable for a 21st C. lifestyle…. I’m loving it up to the kitchen, which looks like a complete mess to me.
Anyway, this place seems insanely overpriced. You could buy on Broadway in prime Pac Heights for about this price…
Bean bag tossing is a Midwest game??
I always interpreted mud rooms as a dogwhistle to people with children.
I just saw some folks tossing beanbags in Washington Square this weekend. It is a North Beach pastime then?
http://www.playcornhole.org/
^ cornhole? And that’s not a satirical site? There’s a lot of cornholing going on in SF, just sayin’
We play beanbags at crissy field all the time.
Dig that gaudy black mirror – anyone know where they sell something like that? Z gallerie?
So, this is a Kentucky “sport”. Not the Midwest.
Hey, that kitchen has a great work octahedron going…
A 4.0 will transform this cellar into a king size Veuve-Clicquot decanter.
$5M? These guys are smoking corn cobs. 121 Liberty was very nicely done and only sold for $3.2M.
They will be lucky to get $3.5M. I predict it eventually goes for $3.3M.
I’ll bet 900/sf or 4.2M
Any idea how to get to the “legal” one bedroom on the ground floor without going through the garage or through the front door – hardly what you want your tenant to do?! It doesn’t look like there is a side alley, but can’t tell from these plans.
When I lived in oregon you needed a mud house.
Everyone seemed to have a two-tone paint treatment on their interior walls with a darker was “wainscot” wash on the lower portion that perfectly corresponded to the area their dogs soaking wet wagging tail could reach as they ran through the house.
What is that weird black column thing jammed between the front living room and the foyer?
bean bag toss is a.k.a midwestern corn hole
The headline is just begging for the follow up post when it closes and a quote from Patrick Henry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_Liberty,_or_give_me_Death!
Agh…another classic Victorian stripped of its unique victorian-ness inside. High ceilings yes, but no moldings, lame baseboards, simple plain door and windown treatments. How will this look in 10 years with the dramatic and kind of ugly black granite fireplace surround that is soooo 2012 and the lighting that is pretty and also very 2012, but will probably seem horribly outdated a decade from now.
Great location though. Agree about $900 a foot for sales price. Not bad for Lower Dolores Heights, Mistro, Upper Mission Terrace…..
I thought it’s nearly impossible to go from 2-unit to SFH. How does one go about doing this?
“Agh…another classic Victorian stripped of its unique victorian-ness inside. High ceilings yes, but no moldings, lame baseboards, simple plain door and window treatments. How will this look in 10 years with the dramatic and kind of ugly black granite fireplace surround that is soooo 2012 and the lighting that is pretty and also very 2012, but will probably seem horribly outdated a decade from now.”
Bears repeating, and it might not even take a decade. What would it take for the market to shift back toward emphasis on historically accurate restoration, revising only where needed to enhance functionality (e.g. adding a microwave, improving energy efficiency, etc.)?
Bears repeating, a lot of the time these properties do not have any victoriana left + improving efficiency/enhanced functionality means new wiring, pipes, windows and insulation not just a microwave.
There are way enough rules regulating what YOUR place has to look like from the outside. At least give people a choice on what’s inside. I agree that an original interior is a valuable asset, but people are free to decide whether they want to keep them or not. If they follow a fad (or a self-serving architect) then their loss and they’ll pay it in a few years. But these are houses, not museums.
Yeah, once you’re replacing the plumbing, electrical, and heating systems it is easiest just to just open up the walls completely. The fastest and cheapest way is to tear out the original details.
It is possible to preserve the details though that comes at a cost because you have to delicately remove all of the trim which is often bone dry and brittle. Inevitably pieces break and then you’ll need to get custom matching replacement material. Time consuming and costly but definitely possible without breaking the bank.
But the real death of Victoriana is the floorplan. A century ago the trend was to cut a house up into a lot of little boxes. Opening the pocket doors between the parlor and dining rooms was the closest you got to the modern idea of a great room. People these days want much more open floorplans, an architectural attribute that would make the Victorians gasp in disgust.
That and the bathrooms are tack on rear additions in a lot of victorians.
lolcat_94123, to turn a two unit into a SFR, you add a second full unit down with its own entrance to the outside, and its own kitchen, and a door between the two “units”. Exactly the way they did it here.
The downstairs then becomes the living space for the Au Pair that everyone thinks is a great idea in the abstract when they are buying, but that no one can afford once they realize how much it actually costs to raise kids in SF.
“but that no one can afford” becuase they are taking their meager facebook money and going back to school.
The architect here. While I didn’t choose all the finishes, I appreciate the (mostly) polite comments. I was born and raised in Sonoma, CA, not New England.
He may be swinging for the fences here, but you have to at a minimum give the architect and his agent props for knowing how to generate positive P.R.. This house has been covered recently in both The Chronicle and The Wall Street Journal. From the latter, An Updated Victorian for $4.995 Million:
So there you go. It will be very interesting to see what happens to this place and by extension what current buyers are willing to pay for traditional homes whose interiors have been thoroughly modernized.
The list price for 111 Liberty has been reduced $500,000 (10%), now asking $4,495,000 or $956 per remodeled square foot.
One question for the architect: Why not an elevator?