Painted Ladies

Panoramic Route San Francisco, California

In American architecture, painted ladies are Victorian and Edwardian houses and buildings repainted, beginning in the 1960s, in three or more colors that embellish or enrich their architectural details. The houses in this neighborhood, built between 1849 and 1915, number about 48,000. The term "Painted Ladies" was first used in Victorian homes in San Francisco by writers Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen in their 1978 book "Painted Ladies". Although polychrome decoration was common in the Victorian era, the colors used on these houses are not based on historical precedent.

The term was first used in 1978 for San Francisco Victorian houses by writers Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen in their book. Altough many were destroyed by the 1906 earthquake, a great number of houses managed to survive. During World War I and World War II, many of these houses were painted battleship gray with war-surplus Navy paint. In 1963, San Francisco artist Butch Kardum began combining intense colors on the exterior of his Victorian house; due to his successful experiment, Kardum became a color designer, and he and other artists/colorists began to transform large numbers of of gray houses into Painted Ladies. By the 1970s, the colorist movement, as it was called, had changed entire streets and neighborhoods. This process continues to this day. A celebrity among the groups of "Painted Ladies",the row of Victorian houses at 710–720 Steiner Street in San Francisco is sometimes known as "Postcard Row"; this block celebrity appears in media and mass-market photographs of the city and it has featured in countless movies, TV programs, and ads.