He’s Painted Thousands of San Francisco’s Iconic Victorian Homes. Meet Dr. Color

A hot pink nail salon. A yellow taqueria. A periwinkle Edwardian with red trim.

Block after block along San Francisco’s bustling 24th Street, architectural gems mimic the vibrant papel picado strung up in windowfronts across the historic Mission District corridor.

Less eye-catching, however, are the small signs affixed to the sides of these buildings, an understated acknowledgment of the man who painted thousands of technicolor buildings and helped shape the city’s iconic skyline in the process: Bob Buckter, better known as Dr. Color.

San Francisco is widely known for its colorful architectural landscape, particularly the rainbow of Victorians dotting its hillsides. Much of it can be attributed to Buckter, who has painted and consulted on color design for tens of thousands of Victorian homes, churches, commercial buildings and more for nearly 60 years.

“There’s another job with my sign on it,” Buckter said on a recent fall afternoon, gesturing to the left as he drove down 24th Street in his royal blue pickup truck, a license plate that reads “DRCOLOR” on the back bumper.

“The guy wanted the wildest pink I could come up with, and there it is,” Buckter said.

The 78-year-old’s work uses different colors to highlight the ornate details of a building’s facade, generating the polychromatic architectural backdrop that draws so many people to the City by the Bay.

“San Francisco is the leader of the identity of Victorian architecture across the West Coast. I would probably venture to say even across the nation,” said Clark Thenhaus, associate professor of architecture at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Victorian-style architecture in the United States was first popularized on the East Coast, where these homes were constructed with natural materials like stone and brick, giving them more neutral earth-tone colors, like softer grays and browns.

As the style moved toward the West Coast, timber became the primary building material for Victorians. Wood exterior made a better canvas for paint, and soon the multicolored facades could be found across California, from Santa Cruz to Nevada City in the Sierra foothills and Eureka along the coast in Humboldt County.

“What you find is actually a whole new way of thinking about color, because now it’s not derivative of a specific material. It’s actually applied to something,” Thenhaus said. “That’s when you start to see the Victorians kind of change their clothing from this earthen material to something that’s much more vibrant and bright.”

Buckter started painting houses in the 1970s after graduating from San Francisco State University with a degree in social sciences and a minor in business, cultivating his passion at the cusp of the city’s psychedelic era. After doing a couple of paint jobs for a friend, he placed an ad in a local newspaper offering house painting services to earn some extra cash while pursuing a career in real estate.

He never completed any formal art or color theory training, but after he landed his first home painting gig, clients kept coming. After retiring from painting homes himself in his thirties, color consulting became his full-time work.

“I just learned everything the hard way,” Buckter said. “I made sure people would be happy, even when I was trying new things, and I learned a lot doing that.”

Maria Diaz Bobillo, who lives in a yellow accessory dwelling unit that Buckter designed across from Dolores Park, chose the unit specifically for its sunny hues.

“A friend sent me the Craigslist ad, and she was like, ‘It speaks to you, it has your colors,” she said. “It has this deep yellow, and I had friends who used to call me Yellow Maria because my whole wardrobe was yellow. It was meant to be, you know? And it’s very beautiful.”

In front of her cottage stands another one of Buckter’s jewels, a three-story Victorian that features 11 colors in total. A yellow and gold face with blue, green and purple trimmings, plus a stained glass feature next to the front staircase.

“This is a big part of my life, this building,” Buckter said, using a green laser pointer to identify elements of the design.

Dr. Color himself lived in the building before moving to his current residence, a periwinkle Edwardian with gold leaf finish on Vermont Street. And he remembers every detail that went into both homes.

“I rigged this whole thing with my own scaffolding, you know, a plank that goes all the way across with hooks and ropes, and I did all the work up there myself,” he said, pointing to a hand-stenciled ribbon feature lining the top of his yellow building at Dolores Park.

Buckter rattled off memories of living there, like hot tub ragers on the roof overlooking the city’s skyline. “Lots of parties, and before all those buildings were built, this had a view of the Bay Bridge,” he said, pointing to Salesforce Tower in the distance. “Now you can’t see it, but what am I going to do? Just enjoy it, I guess.”

For many years, Buckter, a second-generation San Franciscan who was born in the Mission District and grew up in the Sunset District, worked right alongside the painting crew on scaffolds, highlighting all the nooks and crannies with multiple colors that make it impossible not to stop and stare.

They never had a major accident, but they did take a few chances.

“One day, one of the guys that put the hooks up on the building for the plants said, ‘Hey, there’s a bunch of marijuana on this roof drying out. Send me up a brown paper bag.’ So I sent that up, we smoked it and this stuff was out of this world,” he laughed. “In retrospect, it might’ve been mixed with some bad stuff, but the good thing is everyone is still alive and healthy. So we had a lot of fun.”

Several artists and other “colorists” began experimenting with home exterior colors in the 1960s, inspiring one another’s work. Buckter himself did the color for two of the best-known Victorians on Steiner Street overlooking Alamo Square Park, called the “Painted Ladies,” but those have since been repainted. His work is mentioned throughout the 1978 book, Painted Ladies – San Francisco’s Resplendent Victorians, which coined the term.

These days, Buckter primarily provides color consulting services where he’ll advise clients on palettes and types of paint for homes and businesses across the country.

He recently released his own book, which he said is his first and last, on all of the signature work he’s done in the city and beyond.

“I’m still doing commercial and industrial work; however, my labor of love and what I really enjoy best is historic homes,” Buckter said.

Victorians are more than just a pretty sidewalk attraction, though, Thenhaus said. They represent eras of history, social movements and changes across the city at large.

In the 1960s and ’70s, “most of the Victorians were more like a commune back in the day. These were like sex, drug and rock ‘n’ roll places. There were a lot of people living there, and they were inexpensive at that time,” Thenhaus said.

Former homes of groups like the Cockettes, an avant-garde theater and drag group, or the Grateful Dead, still draw crowds of tourists to this day. The groovy ethos of those eras inspired their colors, but they were also a visual tool of the counter-cultural and civil rights movements of their time.

Brightly colored Victorians in the Castro, for example, signaled safe spaces for thousands of gay men who moved to San Francisco during World War II, after being discharged and denied G.I. benefits from the U.S. military due to their sexuality.

These homes also serve as a marker of some of the city’s darker histories, like the numerous Victorian homes that were placed on trucks and physically moved out of the historically African American Fillmore District and into other neighborhoods like Pacific Heights around the 1970s, displacing thousands of Black residents.

Today, efforts to preserve the city’s Victorian image in some ways belie the history that made them so culturally significant.

“They’re often now the most expensive real estate in the city, and often they are single-family homes or carved up into apartments,” Thenhaus said. “In a way, it is just preserving an image of them, but not necessarily with the kind of counter-cultural revolution that came with what led to them being so brightly painted and ornate.”

As the city faces a pressing housing crisis, pouring money, time and effort into preserving Victorians strikes some as out of line with residents’ more utilitarian need for shelter.

“You have this real conflict of what is the priority from a city planning standpoint: the imageability of the city and its popular appeal for tourism to see these houses juxtaposed by the growing need for more housing, probably better housing, and ways of thinking about the kind of equitable structure of the housing market,” Thenhaus said.

Nevertheless, Victorians have stood tall throughout the city’s many boom and bust cycles. Clients still come to Dr. Color with their own ideas and preferences, and he steers people toward combinations he thinks will bring out the best of the building’s architecture, drawing on elements of the surrounding area and environment.

Color fads also come and go. One trend you won’t see Buckter getting enthusiastic over is monochrome, such as the all-black or all-white Victorians some homeowners are going with these days.

“In my opinion, that is an ignorant approach to decorating your facade, because the owners are ignoring the architecture. They aren’t paying attention to what the building has. I do,” he said.

Thenhaus said the single-color approach is part of a wider trend in fashion, a sort of “clean girl” aesthetic that’s crept into architecture and design. But it also harkens back to some of the city’s earliest Victorian homes, like the Queen Annes erected in San Francisco after the Gold Rush, which were often painted all white to cover up their wooden exterior.

“We’ve seen it where a lot of fashion went to a kind of monochrome. I don’t know that I read it at this point anyway as being a political statement or reaction or anything like that,” the architecture professor said. “My take on it is it’s actually a way of differentiating from the plethora of colors out there, like, here’s an all-black, here’s an all-white.”

Buckter has had more freedom to be creative in San Francisco than he would in many other places. City officials say they rarely step in to regulate a building’s color. Some exceptions include if a building is a designated landmark or located in certain areas like the Jackson Square Historic District, downtown’s conservation district or the Northeast Waterfront Historic District.

Buckter is well known around town. When this reporter contacted the Planning Department for information on color regulations, the response was immediate.

“You wouldn’t be talking about Bob Buckter by any chance, would you? Only asking because his name is the one that came to mind,” Daniel Sider, chief of staff for San Francisco Planning, wrote in an email to KQED. “I’m familiar with him because — to be totally honest — my HOA hired him when we repainted my building.”

Sider’s building went with a sky blue face with white, beige and navy blue details — Dr. Color’s personal favorites.

“I like blue,” Buckter said. “My truck is blue and I’ve got a couple old Mercedes-Benz collector cars that are also blue and gray.”

But most anything goes for Dr. Color, if it’s what the client wants. His approach and inspiration, he said, “is to have people happy about what I’m doing, something they personally like, and that will appeal to the widest range of people so they can look up and see something that is in very good taste.”