San Francisco’s most and least expensive homes this week

The royal treatment on Russian Hill, while Nob Hill courts a bargain

By Adam Brinklow May 19, 2017, 3:41pm PDT

A short Nob Hill building with a shingled exterior.

Friday is time for the High & the Low, a Curbed column chronicling the most and least expensive homes sold in San Francisco in the last seven days. Here’s this week’s pageant of extremes.

Traversing the first of San Francisco’s in-demand hills this week, head up Russian Hill to 1750 Taylor Street and the Royal Towers building circa 1964.

The oddly shaped building on a two-pronged property doesn’t look much special from the outside, but in recent years condos in the astronomically priced building have broken into the eight figure range, at least at asking.

Unit number 805 didn’t quite scale those heights, but it did ask nearly $7.7 million for a two bed, one bath unit back in January, which is quite an ambitious escalation from the $3.45 million that former banking software company CEO Dennis P. Stradford paid for it in 2014.

Billed this time as a “reimagined co-op,” the four-bed, four-and-a-half bath unit that takes up half of the floor even boasted a library and a butler’s pantry. The final price this week came out to just over $7.07 million—short of its original royal ambitions, but enough to tower over the competition nonetheless.

This week’s lowest market-rate sale (as far as publicly listed homes go) happened over on that other most iconic of San Francisco hills, Nob Hill, in a 1973 building (though the ad says ‘72) with a smaller profile but a little extra architectural eminence.

According to the ads for 930 Pine Street #314, the shingled Nob Hill Court building and its brick courtyard sprung from the mind of pioneering architect Beverly Willis.

Willis started designing in the Bay Area in the 1970s and founded the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation in 2002 to, in her words, challenge the “male dominated, macho culture of the building industry.”

This little 500-square-foot studio listed in April and beat its asking price by about $25,000, coming to $574,000 in all now. Notably, the same realtor has a half dozen active listings in the same building, so this one may come up again.