By FRAN MORELAND JOHNS
Even during the first weeks of the virus lockdown in early April, the Artists Inn at 2231 Pine Street was at full occupancy, brimming with love and laughter. But it was a bittersweet time.
Beloved owner Denise Shields had recently returned from her second home in Mexico with an ache that turned out to be pancreatic cancer. The cozy little blue house half a block from Fillmore, behind a white picket fence, quickly filled with her two sons, Will and Jason, daughter-in-law Lily and five granddaughters. Will’s partner Elisabeth was home in San Diego awaiting the birth of grandchild No. 6. “We’re sort of hoping for a boy,” Denise said during a brief break from a family Parcheesi game, “but we’ll be delighted with any healthy baby.”
Two months later, on June 6, the family welcomed a sixth granddaughter into the world. Three days after that, Denise died.
Now the Artists Inn, in one of the oldest houses in the neighborhood, is ending an era as a center of warmth and hospitality for guests from around the globe. Following the death of their mother on June 9, Denise’s sons reluctantly decided to permanently close the four-room inn. They will host a garage sale — masked and socially distanced — from August 14 to 16.
Denise and Bill Shields had lived in New York and Paris before they settled in San Francisco in 1976. Their real estate agent showed them the long-neglected 1863 farmhouse, but advised them not to go in. “It was a real mess,” Bill recalled years later. “I took one look and said ‘Let me have it.’ ” He had been a renowned illustrator in New York before deciding to focus on fine art, and in time would come to see the house as his greatest art project. Denise, a gifted interior designer, had limitless ideas as his partner in creativity.
The two first met in New York when she was 19 and he was twice her age. Though good friends, they went on to marry other people, and Denise moved to California. Later, after ending their first marriages and returning to New York, they re-met — “and that was it,” she said years later. “It was like falling in love with a very dear friend.” By 1976, when they first saw their future home, they had two sons. Jason was 5 and Will 2. By the time the boys were in classes at the French-American International School, their home was a gathering place for multitudes of friends.
“It was really an oasis,” Jason said, “a very special place with an atmosphere of freedom. Our parents, for better or worse, gave us pretty free rein.” Bill built a garage with studio spaces for himself and two others on the upper floors in 1986 on the back of the lot facing Wilmot Alley, which would later become the Artists Inn. But before then, the backyard area was “like a jungle,” Will recalled, with sheds and trees and dense growth that were a dream for the boys and their friends.
Denise welcomed them all. She juggled successful careers in catering and interior design — for years she was the go-to person every real estate agent wanted to stage houses for sale — around annual backyard Easter egg hunts and widely famous Christmas Eve buffet dinners. Bill was usually close by, doing dishes, gathering plates or sitting on a kitchen stool talking with guests. The kitchen featured a giant Wolf range, on which his mother once cooked an entire pig — “head, feet, the whole thing,” Will remembered — for a fundraiser at the French-American school.
From the time they were toddlers, racing their big wheels up and down Wilmot Alley, Will and Jason spent weekends with their parents at Marin flea markets. “Everything about the house was salvaged, fixed-up,” said Jason. “It was always a work in progress.” The brothers remembered countless incidents at the home their parents created: the raccoon who wandered in for a while, the stray cat who made her way into what would later be the inn’s Garden Room before delivering a litter of kittens. Generations of that feline family became part of the Shields household — and many others around the neighborhood.
Once the Artists Inn evolved into a small bed and breakfast 20 years ago, the house changed for Jason and Will, who both had finished college and were on their own by then. “The B&B took its toll,” Jason said. “It offered a livelihood for Mom; she had a new path, new energies. And Dad was supportive, as always. But it put an end to the home we had known.”
Bill Shields died in 2010, a week before his 85th birthday. He was buried in Arlington Cemetery with honors befitting a distinguished Navy pilot. Denise continued to host guests from all over, while taking time off occasionally at another home they had established in Mexico.
Denise and Bill were always travelers. Every summer, Jason and Will recalled, there were trips — to Thailand, China, South Africa, France, Morocco and beyond. In December 2019, Denise treated her sister, an English teacher in their native Connecticut, to an extended trip to Egypt that had long been her sister’s dream. Then Denise went for what turned out to be a final visit to Mexico. Soon after she came home to San Francisco, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
The family gathered one final time at the gracious little house on Pine Street. Once again, the old farmhouse came alive with both tears and laughter. And by now it was an exquisitely appointed B&B featuring four guest rooms with private baths, offering the perfect accommodations for a family surrounding a beloved mother and grandmother, even during a pandemic.
The family was home again, in the little house the realtor had warned them all those years ago not to go inside.
EARLIER: “The artistic innkeepers“
Filed under: Art & Design, Food, Drink & Lodging, Locals
