Victorian/ Edwardian Architecture - floorplans/ characteristics

Factual Questions
1

I have been told that the houses along Haight St. in San Francisco are a mixture of Victorian and Edwardian. I’m having trouble finding the difference. In fact, I can’t find anything at all. I suspect my apartment was once Edwardian. All the roommates are perplexed over how the place was originally laid out.

We have French doors from one bedroom leading the living room. There is a seperate door a few feet away from that leading into the living room as well. The living room has two Bay Windows. It also has what looks like a gas and water pipe which are now sealed off. The back room has a proper door from the hallway but 2’ away is a swinging door into the Kitchen. We take up the whole second floor, downstairs is a restaurant.

Anyone know of any on-line resources which would have floor plans or any other info on what this place might have looked like a four or five decades ago ? All my google search turned up was a bunch of bed-and-breakfast outfits or simply articles concerning Victorians in the San Francisco area but nothing specific about historical floor plans. Thanks.

2

I feel your pain. This is one of my hobbies, too, and you’re right, there’s nothing on the Web covering this. You’ll have to do like I did and go down to the library and look at actual books in the “architecture” section.

You live in a famous district for big old houses, so I will bet you a nickel that your local public library will have literally shelf after shelf of books on your kind of house.

Also, Dover Books has a nice selection of reprints covering authentic house plans from the 19th century.

http://store.doverpublications.com/

Generally speaking, the houses in the Haight were built in the early 1900s, which makes them technically “Edwardian”. However, most people simply use “Victorian” to mean those Painted Lady-type houses, with all the gingerbread and bay windows. I’ve never really heard “Edwardian” as an adjective applied to 19th century houses–it’s always “Victorian”, although “Victorian” can cover a lot of territory, from the 1840s Gothic Revival to the 1900 Queen Anne.

The first thing to figure out is whether your house was originally built as an apartment building, or as a single-family house, or as a “live above the store” building. Generally you can look at the staircases. If it looks like there was originally one outside entrance door, a small foyer, and then a stairway going upstairs to an apartment and another entry door into a downstairs apartment, then it was probably originally a duplex. If it was originally a “live above the store” building, then it will have a separate outside entrance and stairway for your second-floor apartment, to the side of the restaurant’s front door.

In a single-family home, all the bedrooms would have originally been upstairs. Only farmhouses of this period ever had a downstairs bedroom–civilized middle-class people slept upstairs. So all the downstairs rooms would have been combinations of parlors, dining rooms, libraries, etc., with French doors here and there. Have you got sliding pocket doors?

They were very big on lots and lots of connecting doors between all the rooms, because the furnace didn’t have a hot-air blower, so heating the house was totally dependent on hot air rising from the furnace in the basement, and the more openings you have between the rooms, the easier it is for the warm air to circulate. If a room only has one door, it’s harder to warm air to get in there.

The kitchen would have been a distinct afterthought, and was frequently located down in the basement, to keep the smoke and smells away from the gentry. There would have originally been one (1) bathroom, upstairs, on the bedroom floor, at the back of the house.

There may have been a maid’s room, on the second (bedroom) floor. It would have been behind a hallway door, so it could be closed off from the “family” bedrooms, next to a smaller back staircase that leads directly down to the kitchen, if the kitchen was on the first floor. Does it look like one of the upstairs bedrooms is smaller than the others, and can be closed off by a hallway door? That’s the maid’s room.

A teeny tiny bedroom, measuring about 6 feet by 8 feet, was a “trunk room” or “sewing room”.

3

Okay, sitting here visualizing this and thinking about it: You’ve got a long narrow hallway with rooms opening off it–a living room, a bedroom, a back room, and a kitchen. There are French doors between the living room and the bedroom. The back room has a door into the hallway, and it also has a swinging door into the kitchen, which presumably does not have a door into the hallway? Are these the only rooms? There’s a bathroom somewhere, I’m presuming?

I’m guessing that you’ve got a “live above the store” building, mainly because French doors didn’t normally appear on the “sleeping floor” in a single-family home–they were for show, and strangers weren’t expected to be upstairs in the family’s sleeping quarters admiring the French doors.

Is there a door connecting the “bedroom” and the back room? If so, then you’re living in what’s called a “railway flat”, where all the rooms are in a straight line and they connect to each other, and it’s definitely a “live above the store” building. In a railway flat, it’s optional where you decide to put the beds. Since all the rooms connect, there’s not much privacy anyway, so it was up to each family to decide which room to eat in and which room to sleep in.

Is there a third floor, with bedrooms?

4

Cool, Duck Duck Goose - I think you have helped quite a bit with the research.

You may be correct about the “Live above the store” floorplan.

The seperate entrance to the apartment has a small foyer. At the top of the stairs turn left you are facing the door to bedroom number. From the bedroom there is also a French Door facing toward the front of the house and opening into the living room.

Facing the first bedroom turn left and you pass through a door also leading to the living room. Turn right at the top of the stairs and you have a small bedroom (maids room ?) on the left and bathrooms one and two on the right. Also on the right is the furnace. Further down the hall and to your left is door number one into the back bedroom which also features a fireplace. The closet to the back bedroom is directly across the hall and is medium in size. Proceeding forward to the back of the apartment and you are standing in the kitchen with a swinging door also leading into the back bedroom. None of the bedrooms have connecting doors.

Tomorrow I will take a fieldtrip down the the bookstore on Haight to do some further research. If I’m lucky I might even find a picture of my apartment from the heydey of the late 60’s.

I am glad to hear that I am not the only one having problems locating this type of architectural information on the web. Thanks for the help !