Front (South) Elevation Detail
Leonard C. Hammond House in San Francisco, California

William Knowles* designed this Shingle Style house built around 1908 on a long, shallow site with a steep grade.  The stepped window probably reflects the presence of an interior stair beyond.  This was a more conservative approach to expressing the interior space on the outside than the stepped balcony on Ernest Coxhead's Weber House, which was only a few houses up the hill.  The two men were friends.  Knowles father had been the contractor on some of Coxhead's projects.  The design of this entrance bay suggests the influence that the older Coxhead must have had on the younger man.  A more detailed view of the unusual front door follows this image.  Old San Francisco city directories point toward Hammond, whose family was in the lumber business, as the original owner.  Photo taken in 2001 by Howard J. Partridge.

* The San Francisco Bay area has been home of at least two architects and one builder/contractor with the name of William Knowles, and the historical record has been murky about which William Knowles was behind the design of this home.  Respected architectural historians David Gebhard and Sally Woodbridge claim in their guidebooks to San Francisco architecture that it was William F. Knowles who designed this home and two others that appear in Cupola's Arts and Crafts Architecture picture tour.  It has since come to light that they have likely gotten the middle initial wrong, and that it was William A. Knowles, Jr. who had been the architect of all three homes.  Until able to confirm that this is indeed the case, Cupola has dropped the architect's middle initial in its own attribution of these homes.  Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny's more recent "An Architectural Guidbook to San Francisco and the Bay Area" has done the same; that is, omitting the middle initial.

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