r/GildedAgeMansions

Wholesale grocer William Haas built this 11,500-square-foot house for his family in 1886. When the earthquake struck 20 years later, the building survived—and the firestorms were stopped at Van Ness Avenue, only a block away.

Three generations of the Haas–Lilienthal family lived here for more than eight decades. In 1973, the heirs entrusted the house, along with much of its original furniture and art, to San Francisco Heritage. It became the city's only Victorian-era house museum: not a reconstructed period interior, but a family home that narrowly outlived the disaster that erased so many of its neighbors.

Larkin Soap executive Darwin D. Martin gave Frank Lloyd Wright one of the defining commissions of his Prairie period. Wright treated the Buffalo estate as a “domestic symphony,” designing the buildings, furnishings and almost 400 pieces of art glass as a single composition.

The family abandoned the property in 1937. It sat vacant for years, and the pergola, conservatory and carriage house were demolished in 1962 for apartment buildings. A restoration begun in 1992 eventually removed those apartments and reconstructed the missing Wright buildings from the surviving plans. The work was completed in 2019. At what point does exact reconstruction become part of a landmark's authentic history?