‘Gallery House’ aims for South Park record with $12M ask

Art and science come together in the design of a home with an asking price that aims for a record in San Francisco’s version of Sand Hill Road.

The home could be a record-breaker in the SoMa neighborhood of South Park, where single-family homes are few and far between. In the last five years, the most expensive sale brought $4.5 million.

There has been no pushback on the price of 70 South Park, a 5,400-square-foot property with a commercial space at ground level, according to listing agent Steve Wu of Compass.

“How do you price a Monet?” Wu asked, adding that he would not want to be the appraiser for the home, whose value, he admits, is “subjective.” The right buyer “loves and appreciates the tremendous architecture, the location and the quality of construction,” he said.

70 South Park, San Francisco, CA (70SouthPark)

The most prominent architectural feature of the four-level property, which comes with an elevator, is the steel lattice across the facade, which provides privacy while still allowing the curved front terraces to overlook the oval-shaped park. It took over a year to design and is based on a 1930s triangulation algorithm; the sculpture garden on the roof is also mathematically inspired.

Appropriately, the sellers are a mathematician, Richard Niles, and a virologist, Lenore Pereiria, according to public record. They bought the property for $1.4 million in May 2005, the same month they sold their traditional Pacific Heights property for $5.25 million. It took five years to conceive and create the new building, which the couple originally intended as a semi-private gallery for their female-only art collection. Dubbed “The Gallery House,” it won two awards from the American Institute of Architects and was written up in architecture magazines and featured in the New York Times.

70 South Park, San Francisco, CA (70SouthPark)

Some of their art is still on display in the marketing photos of the home, while others have been moved out and replaced with staged art, Wu said.

70 South Park, San Francisco, CA (70SouthPark)

Interested parties so far include a mix of residential owner-users who, even at this price point, would appreciate having the income of a rented commercial first floor, and VCs who want the whole building for either live-work space or who plan to convert the entire home into an office.

“There’s no denying that the pandemic and work from home has had some effect” on the desirability of having a South Park address, Wu said, but the SoMa neighborhood is still “an enclave for the VC world, as well as start ups.”

Even as the market slows and buyers get pickier, Wu said unique homes can still bring in eight-figure closings, pointing to his still-unbroken record-setting sale of the so-called “T-House” in Noe Valley for $12 million in 2017. It had the same architects, Ogrydziak/Prillinger, and a one-of-a-kind design that made the outlier price worth it for the right buyer.

“Everyone’s wowed by it,” he said of the South Park home. “It’s not for everyone, per se, but it didn’t win two AIA awards by accident.”

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