PAINTED LADIES, USA

In American architecture, painted ladies are Victorian and Edwardian houses and buildings painted in three or more colours that embellish or enhance their architectural details. The term was first used for San Francisco Victorian houses by writers Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen in their 1978 book "Painted Ladies - San Francisco's Resplendent Victorians".

Since then the term has also been used to describe groups of colourful Victorian houses in other American cities, such as the Charles Village neighbourhood in Baltimore, Lafayette Square in St. Louis, the greater San Francisco and New Orleans areas, Columbia-Tusculum in Cincinnati, the Old West End in Toledo, Ohio, the neighbourhoods of McKnight and Forest Park in Springfield, Massachusetts and the city of Cape May, New Jersey

About 48,000 houses in the Victorian and Edwardian styles were built in San Francisco between 1849 and 1915 (with the change from Victorian to Edwardian occurring on the death of Queen Victoria in 1901), and many were painted in bright colours. As one newspaper critic noted in 1885, "...red, yellow, chocolate, orange, everything that is loud is in fashion...if the upper stories are not of red or blue... they are painted up into uncouth panels of yellow and brown..."

While many of the mansions of Nob Hill were destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, thousands of the mass-produced, more modest houses survived in the western and southern neighbourhoods of the city. During World War I and World War II, many of these houses were painted battleship gray with war-surplus Navy paint. Another sixteen thousand were demolished, and many others had the Victorian decor stripped off or covered with tarpaper, brick, stucco, or aluminium siding.

In 1963, San Francisco artist Butch Kardum began combining intense blues and greens on the exterior of his Italianate-style Victorian house. His house was criticised by some, but other neighbours began to copy the bright colours on their own houses. Kardum became a colour designer, and he and other artists / colourists such as Tony Canaletich, Bob Buckter, and Jazon Wonders began to transform dozens of grey houses into Painted Ladies. By the 1970s, the colourist movement, as it was called, had changed entire streets and neighbourhoods. This process continues to this day.

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