Painted Ladies

"Painted ladies" is a term used for Victorian and Edwardian houses and buildings painted in three or more colors 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 colorful Victorian houses in other American cities, such as the Charles Village neighborhood in Baltimore, Lafayette Square in St. Louis, Missouri, the greater San Francisco and New Orleans areas, Columbia-Tusculum in Cincinnati and the city of Cape May, New Jersey.

Some preservationists use the term polychrome for the style.

Read more about Painted Ladies:  San Francisco's Painted Ladies

Famous quotes containing the words painted and/or ladies:

    What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn’t everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.
    Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)

    Among the earliest institutions to be invented, if I read the stars right, is a Protestant monastery, a place of elegant seclusion where melancholy gentlemen and ladies may go to spend the advanced session of life in drinking milk, walking the woods & reading the Bible and the poets.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)