Pacific Heights Home Seeks Buyer For First Time in Decades

A century-old Pacific Heights mansion with ties to one of San Francisco’s best-known preservation architects is heading to market after more than 60 years in the same family.

The Queen Anne-style home at 2315 Broadway, which dates to around 1900 and serves as this year’s San Francisco Decorator Showcase property, is hitting the market for $25 million, the Wall Street Journal reported. The roughly 9,300-square-foot home boasts nine bedrooms and views facing the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay.

The home was purchased in 1969 for about $100,000 by the late Herbert McLaughlin, founder of KMD Architects, and his then-wife. McLaughlin became known for historic preservation work, including helping save Chicago’s Dearborn Station, and spent decades restoring the Pacific Heights property while raising his family there.

Over the years, McLaughlin restored the home’s original leaded-glass windows and added double-glass doors opening onto a south-facing Japanese garden. The house also includes a sunroom and a ground-floor apartment for staff.

The property traces back to San Francisco merchant Philip Anspacher, for whom the house was originally built, according to the Journal. Like many large San Francisco homes, it cycled through multiple lives over the last century, operating as a rooming house from the 1920s through the 1960s before returning to single-family use.

Susan McLaughlin, the architect’s widow, has owned the home since Herbert McLaughlin’s death in 2015. She remarried and now spends half of the year in Mexico, prompting a downsizing push that includes leaving the longtime family compound behind. She is temporarily renting an apartment in Nob Hill while searching for the property’s next owner.

Luxury homes in Pacific Heights have been selling like hotcakes as the spring housing market in San Francisco heats up, driven in part by an influx of workers in the booming artificial intelligence sector entering the top end of the market and exerting excess demand on limited supply. Earlier this month, a six-bedroom manse at 2830 Pacific Avenue that was once the priciest listing in the city sold for $27.5 million. This week, a modern mansion at 2606 Jackson Street sold above asking price at $24 million, just days after hitting the market.

— Chris Malone Méndez