Ms. San Francisco Real Estate (Janice Lee)

By Christopher Radcool Reynolds Design is like a time capsule. It captures the aspirations of the moment during which it was made. I’m obsessed with historic design because it tells a visual story of our human experience. If you know what to look for, you can see the story of San Francisco in its homes. In the earliest styles, you can see the growth of the city from a scrubby frontier settlement into a cosmopolitan city. Every era had its own look. Turn of the century aesthetics show SF’s struggle with the advancements and losses of Industrialization. During the last century, change happened crazy fast. And modernist design reflects technological and social upheavals that transformed the city’s cultural and actual landscape. Here are the architectural styles of San Francisco homes. What type of house do you live in? When the speculators of the gold rush arrived in 1849 the look of the day was Italianate, a movement that tried to...

A decade ago, billionaire entrepreneurs Peter Thiel and Elon Musk decided to take booming start-up PayPal public from a small coffee shop along Palo Alto's University Avenue. The street, the epicenter of Silicon Valley high tech, also helped incubate such now-established giants as Facebook and Google. But today, Thiel has seemingly left the Valley behind. The venture capital funds he runs are based 30 miles north, in a San Francisco building with views of the Golden Gate Bridge. A number of highly publicized start-ups like Twitter, Square, and Pinterest are also located in the heart of urban San Francisco. As Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey tweeted last February from his new headquarters in San Francisco’s Mid-Market neighborhood, "I love the idea of an urban corporate campus with all the energy and variety that provides." To what extent have clusters of venture capital and start-ups shifted from their traditional locations in suburban nerdistans to urban tech in bigger ci...