An 1850s Captain's Cottage on Telegraph Hill Gets a Second Life With Zac Posen and Harrison Ball

Zac Posen and Harrison Ball have brought an 1850s sea captain's cottage on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill back from a long slide into disrepair. The house, which the couple rent rather than own, dates to the city's earliest decades, and it had plainly been let go before they took it in hand. They worked with Ken Fulk on the project, and the result is a home assembled in strata rather than finished in a single stroke. Nothing about it reads as polished to a showroom gloss; the point was to let the age of the building show through and to live comfortably with its quirks. For a hill known for narrow stairs and small wooden houses that predate the cable cars, a cottage of this vintage treated with this much care is a rare thing to see done properly. That a tenant, not an owner, chose to invest this kind of attention in the place says a good deal about how they regard it.

With reporting from Architectural Digest.