Robert Louis Stevenson's Russian Hill Villa

Luxury Homes Magazine, Western edition, cover story, January 2004

It was an affair to remember … and it was remembered, twice.

In 1876, young mother Fanny Osbourne fled to an artists’ colony in France in an attempt to escape a philandering husband in San Francisco. There, she met Robert Louis Stevenson, the author who would go on to write “Treasure Island” and “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Theirs was a dramatic and unorthodox romance (she was 11 years his senior). Two years later, she went back to San Francisco to divorce her husband, and Stevenson followed her. After they married, their lives spanned the globe, from living in an abandoned mine in Napa to sailing the South Pacific. Eventually, they settled on 300 acres in Western Samoa in 1890. Four years later, his fragile health failed, and Stevenson passed away.

Fanny was determined to preserve his legacy. Returning to San Francisco, she chose a spot in the thick of the city, an area where they had stayed before. Stevenson had loved it for its beautiful Bay views. She commissioned famed architect Willis Polk, who designed a 10,000-sq.-ft. Italianate villa to capture the vistas.

Among her tributes to Stevenson in the house was a stained-glass window depicting the Hispaniola, the ship from “Treasure Island.” The glass still hangs in the window of a stairwell composed of original fir and iron railings.

Although she worked tirelessly to ensure that Stevenson’s genius would be remembered, Fanny went on to enjoy more love in her life, and at the age of 63 developed a relationship that lasted until her death 10 years later. By that point, her tribute to her late husband had become a monument to Polk’s abilities as well. He went on to help redirect the course of San Francisco architecture after the 1906 earthquake.

Nearly 100 years passed, and one day, an equally determined, slim, blonde, vivacious residential home designer saw the villa in her own quest for a new home. “It was tired,” Pamala Deikel said at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco one sunny morning recently. She flashed her soft green eyes to suggest that “tired” was a charitable description. “It needed everything which, of course, I love. She was like this beautiful queen that lost all her glory, so we had to bring her glory back.”

What Deikel saw was this: The 3,000-sq.-ft. garden sloped down 6 ft., at the same angle as the hill it sat on, making it virtually unusable.

“The garden had a 100-year-old magnolia tree that was practically growing into the house,” she said, adding that it also made the garden dark. The third-floor dining room had a 63-year-old tented glass roof that badly needed repair. On the fourth floor, a rooftop space near the master suite had amazing light. Unfortunately, a chain link fence, drainage off the back and a sloped surface made it an eyesore.

Nonetheless, Deikel could see the house’s potential. She loved the location for the same reason Robert Louis Stevenson had – its view of the bay. “It is one of the few homes in San Francisco that has light on 3.5 sides,” she says.

Deikel and her then-boyfriend-now-husband Ted Deikel bought the house in 2000. “We wanted to update it,” she said. “We took it down to the studs and refurbished everything, leaving only the important historical features.”

The renovation took two years. It began with a seismic retrofit, as well as new plumbing and electrical wiring. At the time, the four-story house was composed of two separate flats, split between the top and the bottom two floors. Deikel united them with a new spiral staircase between floors two and three that replicated the original spiral stairs that led from the foyer to the second floor and the Hispaniola window.

One of Deikel’s changes exemplifies her overall vision of light and continuity: She stuccoed the exterior, which had been a dull adobe, a light yellow. “Though the yellow was chancy, I felt that the house was on top of a hill, and with the fog, it needed to be happy and sun-filled,” she said. It worked.

Once she had finished the reconstruction, Deikel went about returning the integrity, romance and history to the house. She bought 100-year-old tiles from French chateaus for the floor and put in a new tented glass roof. She then draped a silk tent under the ceiling to keep the room warm and protect it from sunlight. “Having a stone floor and a glass ceiling would be too loud and too cold,” she said, adding that the silk tent also lent the space some glamour and wonderful acoustics. This became her favorite room in the house; at night one can see the shimmering lights of the financial district and the boats in the harbor.

Deikel also capitalized on the outdoors. She created a fourth-floor master terrace out of what used to be a sloping rooftop and decorated it with a Mediterranean theme: terra-cotta stone tiles, wrought-iron railings and lemon trees – all shielded from San Francisco’s chilly wind by a glass wall. “On July Fourth, we had the most unbelievable vista,” she said. “San Francisco does two simultaneous fireworks at the wharf, and you could see them both. It was like something out of Disney World.”

She transformed the sloping garden by raising and leveling the land and trimming the overgrown magnolia, instantly bringing more light to the garden. She put in a white Carrera marble statue of the three muses surrounded by a fountain, and planted an all-white garden around that. White marble steps from the house drop down to white gravel groundcover, white roses, white hydrangeas, green and white ivy, ferns and lemon trees in white lattice boxes. She and Ted were married in this garden, after all the renovations were complete.

“I fall in love with everything I do,” said Deikel, and in this case, that meant not just the home and her life there but Fanny’s story as well. “I found her to be far more interesting and fascinating than him. If you think of the women at the turn of the century, this woman was way ahead of her time.”

The Robert Louis Stevenson tribute room, created by Deikel on the second floor, reflects her interest in the couple. There she displayed memorabilia of the prolific writer: newspaper articles, photographs – including some early ones of the house with horse carriages out front – and 23 original volumes of his books, given to Deikel by her daughter. This collection is no longer in the home, however. The Deikels moved out after three years because they felt a 23-room mansion was too large for two people. “There were rooms we wouldn’t see for days!” she says. Nevertheless, she was sad to leave and still misses the bedrooms, the dining room and other places in the home she lovingly renovated.

If the new residents ever miss the reminders of the man who inspired the house, all they need to do is take in the sweeping view. The eye trails down the landmarks of the financial district, along the line of the Bay Bridge to the boats in the water, and then it hits upon an island in the distance, a man-made island built in the 1930s, long after Fanny Osbourne. It is called Treasure Island.

WRITING | RESUME | THOUGHTS | CONTACT