Artists as Preservationists?

Preservation is often described as white gloves and glass cases, as keeping things exactly as they were, frozen in time like a bug in amber. But real preservation is something else entirely. It is a contact sport. You only understand it when you are inside a structure that is actively failing.

In a house that is literally crying, with water pouring through the walls, mold creeping up the baseboards, and a main support beam that is tired of holding up its tiny world, you learn the truth quickly. It is a long, sweaty, beautiful fight between decay and care, between collapse and continuity, between forgetting and making something worth remembering.

When I moved into 225 San Leandro Way in 1979, I did not feel like a pioneer. I felt like I had been demoted. I was a teenager coming from a bright, modern 1970s home precariously perched on the south slope of a steep San Francisco hill in a multicultural, mixed economic neighborhood. Moving into this dilapidated, dreary, Mediterranean-style ghost of a house in a conservative neighborhood was a downgrade. The only bit of light was the energy left behind by the five San Francisco Ballet dancers who lived here before us. It had a bohemian spark, but the structure itself was failing, its spirit dim.

My family had no money. I had no money. But I was the son of an auto mechanic. While I was not interested in spending my life under a car hood, I knew how to use my hands. I knew how to fix, make, and build things. I spent my childhood building impossible cardboard and wooden block models of houses and imagining architecture that shouldn’t exist. Now I had a real-life puzzle that was falling apart.

People see the mosaics and the theatrics now, but they didn’t see the decades we spent on the substrates, trying to make the place watertight. We had gutters that were installed so poorly they actually funneled rain into the house. During the winter, the basement, our costume shop, and art studio would flood so fast that we had to evacuate all of the theatrical costumes and fabric. We ended up building an entire storm drain system around the house. We worked with the neighborhood HOA to create drainage in the easements that actually saved the neighbors’ houses from flooding, too.

We didn’t have big-shot contractors. We had energy. We collaborated with young, hungry engineers and immigrant artists who knew how to work with concrete, rebar, wood, and stone because that is how they built homes in their own countries. We worked with local masons to fix the firebrick in the fireplace. We worked with preservationists and masters of plaster to heal the broken and cracked walls that revealed the original redwood lath underneath.

We stayed true to the 1920s soul of the house. We used the best materials we could find, often recycling and repurposing items to keep the history alive. Did we pull permits for every little thing? No. I didn’t even know what a permit was back then. But we built for safety. We built for the long haul.

The decay wasn’t just a slow creep; it was an active collapse. You could walk into a room and literally fall through the floor. Both of our bathrooms were lost to deep water damage, requiring us to completely rebuild and reinforce the concrete foundations for safety. We utilized the unused crawl spaces beneath the floor line to extend the functional space of the rooms without ever altering the footprint of the original 1920s architecture. We then pushed that engineering upward into the roofline, creating vertical shafts that pull natural light and ventilation from the sky down into the belly of the house. One room was transformed into a sanctuary of cedar, bamboo, and black river stone by a Japanese woodworker and a master stone worker. The other, where the original 1920s porcelain fixtures had caved into the earth, became a seven-year immersive mosaic project. These aren’t just bathrooms; they are structural interventions that eliminated the need for daytime electricity and turned a ruin into an ecological story of recovery. This was preservation as a radical act of design, using every inch of unused space from the subterranean foundation to the roof line, proving that a historic landmark can be both sustainable and soulful.

When the roof started to sag, we augmented it with a steel beam. When we had enough structural integrity underneath that roof, we built into the A-frame attic, which is now my personal apartment, sanctuary, and workshop known as the Multiverse labyrinth, a series of storytelling theatrical arts installations that explore a journey to the other side. We never changed the footprint of the original design. We just layered a new universe inside of it.

Over four decades, more than 125 artists, myself included, have put our creative hands on every bit of surface of this house, from the practical foundation to the whimsical attic. Today, we have nearly 20 artists in residence who spend their studio days continuing this work. We are making history in the moment while we preserve the past. We are currently six years into a massive landscaping project that will likely take another decade. We are planting the stories of the Indigenous people who once walked this land, harvesting plants and seafood where we now stand.

The grit and the art are only half the story. The other half is the bones of this place. We didn’t just stumble into landmark status. We were practicing the stewardship of a master without even realizing it. Our home was designed in 1920 by Walter C. Falch, who also designed iconic homes in the adjacent historic St. Francis Wood neighborhood. That level of architectural clout is baked into our foundation, but Falch knew how to give a building more than just a pedigree; he gave it a soul.

It is this continuity of a building designed to hold multiple lives, functions, and cultural roles at once that quietly positioned the house to evolve beyond private residence and into San Francisco’s broader historic preservation and cultural identity.

He was the same architect who designed the Mill Valley City Hall. That building was a Swiss Army knife of a structure that originally served as a firehouse, a library, and a seat of government all at once. It is a beautiful parallel. Just as Falch designed his civic buildings to wear many hats, our museum has become a multipurpose sanctuary. It is a private residence, an international attraction, and a headquarters for a global arts entertainment business. We are carrying on his tradition of impossible architecture by making one single address serve an entire community. This is our community-serving legacy.

We are the only designated historic landmark in the Balboa Terrace neighborhood. Being recognized as San Francisco Historic Landmark number 318 and joining the Legacy Business Registry is a recognition of what the city calls our high artistic value and our deep ties to the counterculture, multicultural, and LGBTQ plus history of this city. We represent the layers of San Francisco that are often painted over.

This landmark status is a commitment to the conservation and preservation of both exterior and interior features. It protects the stucco cladding and the hipped roof that we kept watertight against all odds. It protects the arched portico where our first mosaics were laid and the interior ground floor where the immersive installations live. But the preservation and conservation go deeper than the surface. We have completely overhauled the electrical and plumbing systems. We have an artistic plumber we simply call Maestro because he is a master of his craft. We replaced the exterior metalwork with copper to withstand the salty coastal elements. We even used copper for the interior pipes for health and longevity.

Right now, we are restoring the kitchen. We are refinishing the original fir subfloor and replacing the broken original linoleum floor with its contemporary counterpart, Marmoleum. It is the same aesthetic and made from natural materials like linseed oil and wood flour. It is eco-friendly and incredibly durable.

We are converting the entire house to LED lighting while meticulously keeping that same warm tungsten feeling. We are conserving energy while we preserve the atmosphere.

Whether we are seeking local heritage funds or looking toward international organizations like UNESCO, our goal remains the same. We want to ensure that this cultural asset remains a beacon for this century and far beyond. We even welcome biotech and tech professionals who have left the corporate world to become artists here.

Through the arts, we keep this culture moving forward with relevance and dignity through uncertain times.

We preserve and conserve both the interior and exterior features equally while taking artistic liberty in the aesthetics of the finishes. This has made it the cultural and historic landmark it is today.

The paintings inside the house are storyboards from our productions, each mapping out the humanity of San Francisco from the time of the Indigenous people to an imagined, hopeful future. These aren’t just decorations; they are the records of every person who has lived here, lives here now, and will one day inhabit or visit this space.

If we are all just temporary tenants on this land, and if even the most solid stone eventually turns to dust, what is it that we are actually preserving? Is it the wood and the copper, or is it the invisible thread of human wonder that connects a 1920s architect to the limitless Multiverse of the artists yet to come?

Our work here goes beyond the physical conservation of wood and stone. It is the preservation of what UNESCO calls intangible cultural heritage. By maintaining this site as an active artist collective, we are practicing adaptive reuse in its most lived form, where a 1920s residence becomes a continuously active cultural space without losing its history or its function as a home for creation and a historic house museum.

But none of that is actually the point when you are here.

Because when people enter this space, they are not encountering a preserved object or an institutional idea of cultural heritage.

They are entering a living environment shaped by imagination, labor, and time, where the real experience is not what the house is, but who it allows them to be.

It is a place where people begin to recognize themselves differently.

Not as visitors standing outside of art, but as participants inside a space that allows them to be more fully themselves.

A place of reconnection, with self, with others, and with the simple clarity of being present.

A connectatorium, where people step out of the noise of everyday life, reconnect to what is essential, and leave more grounded in who they are.

And when they leave, they do not carry away an explanation of the place.

They carry a felt experience of themselves inside it.