2546%2033rd%20Avenue%20Before.jpg
Purchased as a two-bedroom with 1,580 legal square feet for $750,000 eight months ago, the Parkside home at 2546 33rd Avenue has just returned to the market listed for $1,599,000 as a contemporary four-bedroom with 3,500 square feet, “remodeled from the ground up.”
2546%2033rd%20Avenue%20After.jpg
The main floor before:
2546%2033rd%20Ave%20Living%20Before.jpg
And the main floor after:


2546%2033rd%20Ave%20Living%20After.jpg
∙ Listing: 2546 33rd Avenue (4/4.5) 3,500 sqft – $1,599,000 [ewalk.com]

35 thoughts on “Eight Months Later And Twice The Price (And Size) In The Aves”
  1. I am sure there will be some hand-wringing over the facade, but good purchase by the developer. Craftsman entry door doesn’t match the rest of the finishes.
    Looking at Google maps overhead, with an existing third floor it seems like this house was probably a lot bigger than the tax record of 1580sf when purchased. Even if you triple the stated 70K permit fee cost estimate for the work, it seems tough to double the size of a house for $210K.
    Will this neighborhood support a $1.6mm house?

  2. Putting aside the cost issues for a minute, my comment is basically how hideous this remodel is.
    Some of the developer/contractors and I hate to use the word “architect” are sucking the life out of these older homes. There is no soul left to the front façade. You simply walk into one big open room, no sense of entry, no definition.
    If this was assisted by an architect, he/she should lose their license over this piece of crap.

  3. Okay, I’ll wring my hands. Hate to see this cute period façade go away to be replaced by something so bland. Granted, it’s no masterpiece in the original, but it’s still sad.

  4. I agree completely with Futurist. These old houses (and I used to live in one) had a really well thought out entries which gave some separation (and a closet) before entering the main space.
    I’m all for open floor plans, but it is sooooo awkward to walk directly into the middle of the main space. Nowhere for real life things like shoes, umbrellas, coats, etc.
    And is that a heater return air grill under the island??

  5. I live near here. No, the neighborhood won’t support a $1.6M house…yet.
    Basically, the house was gutted and an open floor plan was created. Looking around my house now I can understand why it was renovated with an open plan. However, one major design flaw I have is that the door opens immediately into the space. No entryway. No place to kick off your shoes and hang your coat. That’s just my preference.
    The façade is a bit on the sterile and drab side (given how foggy the area is most of the time a pop of color would be nice), but the door breaks it up with some much-needed warmth. Honestly, does a 4BD house really need 4.5 bathrooms?

  6. Gaa! Colorblind!
    At least the departing tenants did not leave 5 lbs of rotting meat on the kitchen counter for me to discover. Like the last place I picked up.

  7. I don’t really get the outrage about the open floorplan. It’s much easier to put a wall in than to engineer one out. A buyer could build in an entry foyer and split the dining room space off more formally if desired…

  8. The neighborhood had many houses in that price range already. In the past few months, I’ve watched several sell right abound that price in 35th and 29th. Same basic design for all.
    Sad that they destroyed the facade, but I bet this goes at asking within a few weeks.

  9. Wonder if they “hid” the entire heater in the kitchen island. Genius. Not.
    I also think the modern redo is pretty thoughtless, and the front door opening right into the living area pretty lame. They could have done more with the original architecture of the home. This must have been done by a dork-dev, without a real architect involved.

  10. Isn’t this area of town usually considered family housing? Regardless of whether I like this style, it definitely isn’t a family-friendly remodel. At least the staging is appropriate to their intended audience — not even the suggestion a child’s toy or homework desk to be found.

  11. Again, the “restaurantification” of the San Francisco residential housing stock continues. The Planning/Building Department need to get in on this because in the longterm, these houses will not hold up and will become undesirable throwing the SF housing market off kilter. Plus they are ruining homes that may not necessariy be “historic”, but they are over 50 years old. Also, I would bet that this remodel was a defacto demolition (something that is escaping the City’s attention) which raises issues of affordability. Design wise, these open floor plans are now generic.
    Thanks for letting me rant.

  12. I read that one of the advantages of Victorians was that the many rooms allowed you to use the house as you saw fit: a living room could be transformed into a bedroom if you had more kids, if you needed to put up your parents, or if you needed to take a boarder. This allowed people to avoid moving around much, saved a great deal of money, and preserved houses which might otherwise have been destroyed (mansions in what became rundown areas, for example).
    These modern houses seem purpose-built for one specific lifestyle only, and if you want something else, you’re out of luck. I guess if your concern is keeping poor people out at all costs, that’s a good thing…

  13. It is sad about the facade. The new look is awful and will look very ugly in a couple of years. I’m torn on the open floor plan. I think it gives a freer feel, but I also like the idea of a closet by the front door. Also, all of these houses need more bedrooms. Two is just not enough.

  14. I live near here too. It’s not too far from the Lakeshore Shopping Center which has basic restaurants and a grocery store. Fairly close to Stern Grove. A cute neighborhood actually, nice facades with more landscaping in the front yards than usual for the Sunset.
    Previously, I would not have believed there was a market for 1.6 mil houses here, but a handful have sold recently and unremodeled large homes (corner lots, etc) have gone for 1.2 mil. So…someone is buying them. Any insight into who these buyers are would be great. People who want modern, luxe homes and are priced out of the hotter neighborhoods? People from the neighborhood who have done well and want to stay in it? The Chinese??
    The lack of formal entry is especially offputting to an Asian if it’s inconvenient/difficult to put a place for shoes there! But it looks like with creative furniture placement, maybe a low shelving unit running perpendicular to the plane of the front door, or something blocking part of the front window, might work. Still…for 1.6 mil, you’d think they’d have thought it through better.
    There was a time when I wouldn’t have liked the original facade, but after SF Planning put out the Sunset District Historical Resource Survey (http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=3192), I am starting to see the charm of these Sunset designs. Still, the previous interior looked pretty trashed, who knows how much vintage detail was left, and given the modern-interior-Victorian-facade debate, would it be any better to retain a Sunset-facade?
    Very curious how this sale goes and whether it’ll trigger an upsizing in Sunset homes. So weird, still, the thought of that.

  15. I can only hope that the before/after photos were inadvertently transposed. What were they thinking? The new facade lacks all the charm, texture, and visual interest of the old one. Heck, it isn’t even good contemporary design. Looks like another contractor special.

  16. It’s a shame that the house was stripped of some its original mediterranean accents. One of the joys of Sunset houses is/was their storybook appeal and the historical architectural vocabulary in some of their details.
    The Sunset houses that are preserved are real gems. I used to live in a Sunset house with its original hardware and trims–beautiful, unique stuff that I’ve never seen in any other house. I hate to think of those things disappearing forever.
    I don’t think this remodel is totally awful…just somewhat tragic in that it will be dated because these types of layouts are becoming too common. To put some lipstick on a pig, so to speak, I would at least change the interior color of the front door.

  17. My dad built a summer home for my family that had an open floor plan. I came to hate it. No privacy. Noise travels everywhere. It’s actually a problem that the space lacks flexibility and everyone anywhere is in everyone else’s space.
    It’s an idea, an abstraction, but an unpractical reality for a family. Now I live in a Victorian and I love love love the fact that my spouse can watch football and I can close the door to the living room and not hear the game. Cities are noisy. Peace and quiet is precious. I think this design direction is a mistake.

  18. Whenever I get into a home with an open floor plan, I feel I am entering an Howard Johnson breakfast buffet area.
    Open floor plans are so 2005. New money, borrowed money, quick money, funny money. I think people will come back to basics in the next decade, to want warm inviting spaces. Or maybe it’s just wishful thinking from my part.
    I need a formal entrance.
    I need private space in the morning (not everyone looks like Megan Fox or Brad Pitt in their undies).
    I hate feeling a draft, and that I can heat each room separately.
    I need my home to look like a home, and not forensic lab.
    I like a kitchen that’s there for the purpose of cooking before entertaining.

  19. My dad built a summer home for my family that had an open floor plan. I came to hate it. No privacy. Noise travels everywhere. It’s actually a problem that the space lacks flexibility and everyone anywhere is in everyone else’s space.
    It’s an idea, an abstraction, but an unpractical reality for a family. Now I live in a Victorian and I love love love the fact that my spouse can watch football and I can close the door to the living room and not hear the game. Cities are noisy. Peace and quiet is precious. I think this design direction is a mistake.

  20. Aren’t we over the open floor plan yet? Look at that – it’s pathetic. It’s a basketball gymnasium.
    This housing bubble up through the current day has been an extinction event for charming kitchens and bathrooms: In a decade – after all the people who have no taste finally get over thinking open floor plans are hip – all the houses that DON’T have open floor plans, don’t have granite countertops, don’t have stainless steel appliances, don’t have travertine, and don’t have all these crappy cabinets, sinks, etc. are all going to be worth a ton of money.
    “Renoed-original kitchen and bath” is going to be the phrase that gets in the RE ads for the few places that can still claim that.
    What a disaster that new facade is. I’m way into the midcentury and modernism thing, but that simply looks unfinished‼! It looks like some troglodyte RE professional’s version of modernism.

  21. The funny thing about the facade is that they tried to be minimal but then threw in a Home Despot ye olde oaken door containing more details than the rest of the facade all put together.
    asiago succinctly summarized the aesthetic here.

  22. I understand everyone’s resistance to this update, but I can’t help thinking of how fake and trite (Lennar Homes, Kaufman Broad of the era) the origianl faux spanish facade was when constructed (William Crocker developed this neighborhood, right?).
    Do we pine for what was lost because it was so wonderful, or because it was so familiar?
    Other than the prairie style front door, (It would take about $1,500 to swap in a new entry door with more consistent lines) I think there are much worse facades in the city. Has anyone seen Ed Lee’s moustache lately?

  23. True, the shift towards tract home developments in the 1930s removed some of the uniqueness and charm that the prior all-custom developments provided. But the nowadays mass construction style is much more akin to manufactured homes. Many key elements from dingbats to faux balusters to elaborate windows are ordered out of a catalog.
    Thankfully most small infill development is full custom. Too bad that some builders don’t take the chance to actually make the home look custom built.

  24. It looks like a mobile home from the outside. Why?
    The facade was a nice vernacular Spanish Mission Deco. Why bother to destroy it?

  25. To my eyes, the protruding bay window section that ‘looks like a mobile home’ looked in the past like a ‘Spanish Mission Deco’ mobile home.
    My point is that ‘Spanish Mission Deco’ is a completely baloney style that was mapped onto these neighborhoods in the same way that every stucco box in Tracy that has a terra-cotta-esque roof is ‘Mediterranean.’
    Why bother to destroy it? Why bother to save it? There are 10,000 of these homes in the Sunset.
    I mean, it’s Columbus day:
    Real estate agent: “As you can see, this home is in a Mission Revival style.”
    Buyer: (Wincing) “Yes, well…”
    Agent: “Of course, I am sure we can probably have all of the indentured native Americans suffering from smallpox removed before closing…”

  26. Oh yeah. It’s pure chintz. It was one of the facades you could choose in a prefab kind of way, so Spanish Mission, next to Vaguely Deco, next to Googie Modernist, all on the same block.
    But the point is… Why? Why bother going to the expense of tearing out all the detail? I can see they widened the stairs and added 3 square feet by making the doorway flush. The untreated windows and stucco facade look cheap. It generally looks cheap.
    It’s interior I guess I can understand. It looks like every remodel/flip/new construction dwelling for sale in SF, but the exterior is a net loss over a coat of white paint.

  27. Removing the rounded windows was a huge mistake. Now it just looks bland. Modern architects appear to have only ever been trained to use rulers, not curves, and sadly, that boring reality is showing up all over San Francisco in new buildings.

  28. Just a thought: once a majority of houses look like they’re built with rulers and modern (minimal) affectation, the next wave would be a revival of the olden classical/rounded/ornamental tastes. No more stainless steel and granite counter-top in a kitchen made for entertainment?

  29. omg why did they have to uglyfy the house.. the original front looks way better than that ugly new front of the house …… some people just don’t know how to design houses.. the new front just makes it look cheap. doesn’t worth the new listing price.

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