SF mansion’s DeYoung family legacy doesn’t spare it from $2.3M price cut

Home built by Chronicle founder follows nearby estate that sold at a similar discount

A photo illustration of Michael H. DeYoung and 1969 California Street (Getty, A. J. Kane (compiler), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, 1969California.com)
A photo illustration of Michael H. DeYoung and 1969 California Street (Getty, A. J. Kane (compiler), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, 1969California.com)

A landmark Pacific Heights home built by one of San Francisco’s most esteemed architects for one of the most powerful men in the city’s history has taken a 17 percent price cut to $11.5 million.

The $2.3 million reduction on the Willis Polk-designed Gothic Tudor at 1969 California Street comes as a direct result of seeing a nearby, similarly priced listing sell for 17 percent below its ask recently, according to Joseph Lucier of Sotheby’s International Realty, who is co-listing the property with his partner Stacey Caen. He said via email that he expects a “strong market response to this price adjustment.” 

The agents listed the 1915 property in September but took it off the market for the holidays, as he said they normally do for listings at this price point. It was relisted at the end of January with the same $13.85 million price tag it had last fall and Lucier said the January relaunch “brokers tour” was “exceptional.” 

“We had over 30 brokers who had not visited the property during the fall market,” he said. “The current buyer pool is also brand new.”

Yet even with the fresh eyes, the historic home did not find a seller. Lucier said the feedback from buyers was positive overall but that “$10 million-plus buyers are very selective and thoughtful given the current market conditions.” He added that although the home has history, an architectural pedigree and a “gracious” south-facing garden off the public level of the home, its “strong architectural features that less informed buyers might not appreciate” could narrow the buyer pool. 

Dubbed The Tobin House, the home’s major architectural quirk — a half-arch passageway in its facade — came about because Michael DeYoung, the founder of the San Francisco Chronicle and an avid art collector whose namesake DeYoung museum is in Golden Gate Park, may have overestimated his influence over his own family. The four-level, five-bedroom home is next door to what was once DeYoung’s own estate and was a gift for his daughter Constance Tobin. It was meant to connect to a mirror-image home DeYoung planned to have Polk build for another of his four daughters, Helen Cameron. But Cameron rejected her father’s gift and decided to remain on a Peninsula estate instead. 

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DeYoung died in 1925 and two years later Tobin moved her family down to the Peninsula as well. Cameron sold the still-empty lot in 1940, the same year the family decided to demolish the DeYoung estate on the other side of 1969 California, thereby assuring that Polk’s full vision would never come to fruition, according to the home’s marketing materials. 

Tobin purchased some of her father’s land after his home was torn down and it is now the driveway and motor court, with a one-story addition that currently houses the family room and provides for a terrace off the primary suite one floor up. She sold the home three years later to an opera singer who ran the property as a residential hotel for those in the performing arts for the next 45 years. It has had six owners since he sold it in 1988 and was turned back into a 9,000-square-foot single-family home in 1998. The forever-unfinished archway is now a breezeway that leads to the large backyard. The home also has several large terraces on different levels. 

The current owners are fine art dealer and president of the Art Dealers Association of America Anthony Meier and his wife, Celeste, according to public record. They run a gallery on the home’s ground floor and bought the historic house in 2004 for about $6.5 million, according to public record. The Meier’s two children are now grown, Anthony Meier told the Wall Street Journal when the home first came on the market last fall, and the couple plans to downsize to a new home in the Bay Area. They spent about $5 million in updates during their nine years in the property, they told the Journal. 

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That means that at the new $11.5 million price, they will only just recoup their investment in the property. But Lucier said his clients are willing “to publicly recognize the value compression that is being discussed privately within the brokerage community.” 

He added that luxury buyers in the spring market seemed “psychologically more favorably positioned to consider a purchase” than those in the fall, though it’s “too early to tell how the larger buyer pool in the San Francisco market will participate” this spring.

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