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C. A. Belden House

Architect
Walter J. Mathews
Year
1889
Style
Queen Anne
City
San Francisco, CA
Collection
painted victorians
C. A. Belden House
Photo: Sanfranman59, CC BY-SA 3.0
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The C. A. Belden House on Gough Street, facing Lafayette Park, was built in 1889 by architect Walter J. Mathews for Charles A. Belden, treasurer of an importing company. It's unusual in San Francisco for being purely Queen Anne in style, a distinction that earned it an individual National Register listing.

the building

Turrets and a beastly porch. The three-story house has a steeply pitched gable roof and two corner turrets with conical roofs, their surfaces and the first floor clad in fish-scale shingles while the rest of the house wears horizontal siding. Facing the park, the facade carries a richly carved pediment, two sunbursts flanking third-floor windows, and, below an arched second-floor window porch, a panel carved with a grinning mythological beast.

the style

Described as a 'full flowering of Queen Anne exuberance,' the house's carved and plaster ornament has been compared to patterns appliqued on a Victorian sampler, an unusually pure Queen Anne statement for the city.

More on Queen Anne

the architect

Walter J. Mathews, a prominent Bay Area architect, designed the house in 1889; it stands as one of his purely Queen Anne works in a city where the style was rarely applied without mixing.

significance

The house holds an individual listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

nearby

All 99 buildings in San Francisco