Custom Kitchens Inside St. Francis Wood’s Period Homes

PineWood Cabinets designs, builds and installs custom kitchens and cabinetry for St. Francis Wood homeowners remodeling the neighborhood’s 1910s and 1920s period-revival houses. Every cabinet is built and finished in our Rocklin, Placer County workshop and delivered shop-finished, and our own crew makes the roughly two-hour drive to San Francisco to measure, plan the delivery and install.

St. Francis Wood is unlike anywhere else in the city. It was laid out in 1912 by the developer Mason-McDuffie as a residence park on the western slope of Twin Peaks, with a landscape plan by the Olmsted Brothers, entrance gateways by John Galen Howard, and a set of restrictions that kept the houses detached, set back behind gardens and consistent in character. The result is a neighborhood of curving streets, a landscaped central boulevard, mature trees and single-family houses in Mediterranean, Spanish Colonial Revival, Tudor and Colonial Revival styles, bounded roughly by Portola Drive, Monterey Boulevard and Sloat Boulevard, with West Portal’s shops just beyond the western gateway.

The St. Francis Homes Association still looks after the park and reviews changes to the exterior of its houses, which is a large part of why the neighborhood looks the way it does a century on. It also explains where the remodeling energy goes: inside. Owners here keep the stucco, the tile roofs and the street face, and modernize the kitchen, the baths and the way the ground floor flows. The kitchens were built as service rooms, at the back or to one side of the plan, often with a breakfast room, a pantry and a maid’s room beside them, and almost every project we see here opens that corner of the house into a single room for cooking and family life.

Unlike most of San Francisco, St. Francis Wood houses have driveways and garages, but the streets curve, the garages are often below the main floor, and the kitchen can be a flight up from where the truck stops. We measure every stair, hall and door between the curb and the room, build the cabinetry in modules sized to pass through them, and schedule delivery so the crew carries and sets it the same day.

Two reviews can touch a St. Francis Wood kitchen. The building permit comes from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection, and work that changes the exterior or affects a house the city considers a historic resource can also go through Planning Department review; interior cabinetry and finish work within the existing footprint generally does not. Separately, the St. Francis Homes Association reviews changes to the exterior of homes in the park. An interior remodel within the existing walls is generally the owner’s decision, but new or enlarged windows, additions and anything visible from the street should be confirmed with the association early. Moving walls, gas or plumbing moves the project into a fuller city permit. We identify which paths a design falls into before the drawings are finished.

St. Francis Wood sits in the fog belt on the western slope of Twin Peaks, where the marine layer arrives in the afternoon and often stays through the morning. The houses are cool, the air is damp much of the year, and a kitchen on the shaded side of a house can go weeks without direct sun. Wood moves less in steady cool humidity than in our hot, dry home valley, but finishes have to cope with rooms that may never fully dry out. We build frame-and-panel doors so panels can float, favor stable species such as painted maple, white oak and walnut, and apply catalyzed finishes in our Rocklin finishing facility so every face arrives sealed. A shop finish also means no solvent fumes in a house that stays closed against the fog.

The grey light argues for a light palette in the main kitchen, with painted finishes, glazed uppers and open shelving to bounce daylight, and for keeping stained oak or walnut to an island, a scullery or a bar run where it reads as furniture. In a Tudor house the balance shifts a little darker to match the timber, but the principle of lightening the working walls still holds.