San Francisco Tudor - An Aesthetic as Cinematic as Its Own Backstory

“I always asked if Bruce Wayne lived there,” says Hillary Thomas, looking around the landmark home in the San Francisco Presidio Heights enclave that she gut-renovated and designed. “The house seemed lost, and I said to myself, it needs me to help figure itself out.” Built in 1914 by noted San Francisco architect Houghton Sawyer, the six-bedroom, six-bathroom English Tudor mansion has an extraordinary provenance.

After Sawyer's parents died when he was a child, he went to live with his ward and uncle, Leland Stanford, the industrialist tycoon and founder of the eponymous university. Sawyer, who graduated from the first class of Stanford University, went on to study in France. Deeply inspired by his time there, he returned to San Francisco, was hired by the venerable Potter family to build them a stately manor in the heart of the city, and thus broke ground for the fortified edifice.