The Westerfeld House

In a Sept. 29, 1889 Examiner column titled  “A Highly Favored and Rapidly Improving District,’ a critic noted that “among the newest residences in the district is the beautiful mansion, just completed for William Westerfeld, the Market Street caterer, which, with its pure white walls and lofty towers, is a striking object in the landscape, standing as it does upon an elevated site on the northeast corner of Fulton and Scott Streets, just opposite Alamo Square.”

In the 136 years since that first profile, this remarkably ornate, twenty-six-room house has become one of the most photographed and best loved Victorians in the city. Designed by German-born architect Henry Geilfuss, 1198 Fulton Street was completed in 1889 at a cost of $9,985.

William Westerfeld, the Stick-style home’s first owner, came from Germany to San Francisco at age 16 via the Isthmus of Panama. A leading member of the large local German community, he learned his trade as an apprentice in his uncle Louis’s Kearny Street bakery before joining Gustave Page to open a Market Street confectionery. In the 1880s he established his own bakery and restaurant at 1035 Market Street. William, his wife Pauline, a native of Hanover, and their four children Otto, Paul, Ella and Walla lived at a number of other Western Addition addresses before the move to their big house on the Square. Despite the substantial estate William left when he died in 1895 at age 52, his family could ill afford the maintenance costs of 1198 and relocated that same year to 1118 Turk Street. Irish-born contractor Jonathan (John) J. Mahony (1842-1918) bought 1198 from the Westerfelds for his family, who then resided there from the mid 1890s to the late 1920s. The Mahony household, in addition to John and his wife Mary, included four children, an Irish servant, and a Japanese cook.

John widened the Westerfeld House’s main hallway and redecorated the house as a private club. Among those living at 1198 from the late 1950s into the early 1960s were several African-American jazz musicians including John Handy Sr. and Art Lewis, a drummer with the Monty Waters band. In 1966, when investment banker Charles Fracchia purchased the then-neglected old house for $43,000, it was home to a group of hippies. Mr. Fracchia, whose wife refused to move into 1198 because of the neighborhood’s dangerous reputation, evicted the hippies to rent to Kenneth Anger, an underground filmmaker and friend of Satanist Anton LeVey.

Anger brought a young man named Bobby Beausoleil to live in the house and star in his movies who later gained notoriety as a member of the infamous Manson family. By 1968, the majority of rooms had been crudely transformed into loft apartments and the elaborate gas lighting fixtures served as the sole source of heat. In 1968 French native Daniel Ducois, a hairdresser, and his partner, William Von Weiland, purchased the house for $45,000 with plans for its restoration.

When applying for a water hook up, they did so in the name of “The Imperial Russian Consulate,” happy to perpetuate a long standing rumor that the house had once served this function. After restoration, the partners sold it in 1983 to Anne Warner who operated 1198 as the Warner Embassy Bed & Breakfast Inn. Present owner Jim Siegel acquired the residence in 1986 and has spent the last thirty-nine years renovating the building, including restoration of the original basement ballroom.

For the 2025 tour, only the first floor of the house will be open. The upstairs first floor features fourteen foot ceilings, while the second and third floors, with six bedrooms each, have twelve foot and ten foot ceilings respectively. Jim Siegel has decorated most of the interiors with Renaissance Revival Style furnishings and Bradbury & Bradbury wall coverings. On the exterior he has, to great effect, retiled the roof and painted the house in dark earth tones.