Defining a place: handpainted lettering on the facade of Roostertail at 1963 Sutter.

DESIGN | Chris Barnett

San Francisco graphic designer Christopher Simmons has a long list of powerhouse clients including Facebook, Microsoft, Wells Fargo Bank, Stanford, Kaiser Permanente and the Nature Conservancy. So why in an uncertain economy would he take a flyer on two Fillmore startups that sell Vietnamese sandwiches and rotisserie chickens?

For Simmons, owner of the design firm MINE, it was a matter of pride — and guilt.

“I got an e-mail from Denise Tran, who was planning to open Bun Mee, a small restaurant specializing in casual yet upscale Vietnamese street food, but I didn’t respond for six or seven days,” Simmons admits. When he did call, Tran told him she had decided to go with a New York City creative house.

Simmons, a soft-spoken 39-year-old who favors vintage tennis shoes and wears only scruffy duds made before 1970, says he “always wanted to do a restaurant.” He had a good feeling about Tran and her concept and offered to do a full-blown proposal anyway in two days.

Tran recalls it somewhat differently. “I had committed to the other firm, but Christopher called and persuaded me to reconsider. His pitch was so much stronger that I hired him instead.”

After five years in practice as a corporate attorney in Seattle, Tran wanted to escape the billable hours and do something enjoyable. Two years of on-the-road research convinced her that an informal eatery built around a gourmet version of the humble banh mi sandwich (pronounced “bun mee”), plus other traditional and modern Vietnamese dishes, mostly based on her mother’s home recipes, was her ticket out.

She was right. Bun Mee opened in April 2011 at 2015 Fillmore for lunch and dinner. A year later, lines of clamoring customers often spill down the sidewalk.

But before the success hit, Tran was dealing with two design consultancies to get a single seamless visual theme. Simmons’ laundry list of visual suggestions and clever touches, assembled in just two days, brought the concept to life.

For starters, Simmons and MINE staff designer Nathan Sharp went to the legendary Saigon Sandwiches in the Tenderloin to sample their first banh mi sandwich. It was a far cry from Tran’s Hanoi crispy catfish sandwich or the sloppy bun packed with ground beef infused with red curry, a spicy spin on the classic sloppy joe. Next, Simmons tackled a project that had long given Tran fits: a Bun Mee logo that would double as the restaurant’s exterior sign.

“I had actually been working on a logo with another local design firm and it took me three months to get up the courage to tell them their concept wasn’t going to work because I hated it so much,” recalls Tran. “I thought it was my fault because I had never worked with a design firm before and I’m a very, very picky person. It was like something was lost in translation and I was frustrated.”

Simmons started a new logo from scratch. The French influence in Vietnamese cuisine got him thinking that Bun Mee could have the soul of a simple early 20th century brasserie in a sleek 21st century setting.

To make sure that message didn’t get lost, Simmons suggested handpainting the restaurant’s name over the front door in sizeable but not overwhelming red block capital letters with a thin white inline accent color. Underneath the name would be an equally simple description of what’s inside: a “Vietnamese sandwich eatery.”

As expected, Tran was tough to please. “It took three solid months of different versions — back and forth — to get the logo right,” says Simmons. “But I remember getting an e-mail from Denise on Christmas Eve telling me how happy she was, for the first time, that she had a visual of what Bun Mee was going to look like.”

The designer also felt that the artisanal handpainting of the signs helped reinforce the concept that all Bun Mee sandwiches — indeed, everything on the menu, from Mekong shrimp salads to Saigon peanut rice bowls — would be handmade. Even the menu was handpainted on pieces of wood and hung on the wall; each dish has its own small board. If the chefs add a new item or cancel an old one, the menu can be easily changed.

Other design details inside are refreshingly restrained. Photographs capturing swarms of Vietnamese street food hawkers populate the walls. And since there are likely as many Vespas in the Southeast Asian country as in Italy, Simmons used discreet ads for the ubiquitous motor scooter as wall art as well. A warming MINE touch: a slab of rusted corrugated metal that covers the surface underneath the cash register. Another eye-grabber is a suspended shelf filled with motor oil cans that have the red logo on the label and are filled with Bun Mee T-shirts. Proceeds from shirt sales go to charity.

Tran is currently looking for the next Bun Mee location and is sticking with the identity she’s already bought and paid for. “Any business owner who wants to save money by not spending it on branding or graphic design today is making a big mistake,” she says.

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The ideas Simmons and Sharp developed for Bun Mee have been effective advertising for the MINE design office.

“Restaurants are a hard industry to crack, but once you’re in, you’re in,” Simmons says. A case in point: Chefs Gerard Darian and his wife Tracy Green checked out Tran’s eat-in or take-out hotspot and hired mine to help Roostertail, described as their “new, hip, fast casual American rotisserie,” take flight in the neighborhood.

Darian had worked the stoves at Wolfgang Puck’s famed Spago in West Hollywood during the 80s, was sous chef at Puck’s Postrio here in San Francisco in the 90s — where he met Green, who was also working in the kitchen — and was later executive chef at Bix on Gold Alley in the design district. Then the couple owned a sandwich shop for 10 years, but became restless and wanted to try out a new culinary concept. Their choice: fresh rotisserie cooked chicken at moderate prices — $5.75 for a quarter of a chicken to $18.50 for a whole bird — along with a few other “lean protein” main dishes, “substantial sides” and hefty sandwiches.

It took them a year to find a prime, affordable location. They eventually landed the space at 1963 Sutter, just off Fillmore, the longtime location of Cafe Kati.

“We liked what was happening in the lower Fillmore, the 1,800-foot space had good bones and we decided to just go for it,” Darian says. With local architect, space planner and interior designer Stacy Jed, they also created a self-serve eatery, but theirs has twice the seating space of Bun Mee.

Roostertail also needed a distinctive logo that would be memorable and could double as an outside sign. Envisioning a lively array of customers of all ages, Simmons started with the universal symbol of romance — a plump heart pierced by an angel’s arrow — and morphed it into a big-breasted chicken speared by a rotisserie spit. “We were going for the classic Americana feel in the food,” says Darian. “We were a quick, casual order place with an upscale twist.”

Roostertail opened last December and has been packing in the crowds ever since. Jed, the architect and interior designer, went for nostalgia. Some of the walls have light gray wainscoting; others have iconic subway tiles. Big vats of lemonade and a bundt cake under glass, made according to Tracy Green’s mom’s recipe, gently harken back to simpler times. Simmons extended that theme with typography and handpainted signage.

Although the place bills itself as a “fast-casual” eatery, the look and feel encourage diners to relax, and 20 distinctive beers plus wine and root beer are offered to help them do just that. The open kitchen, with a collection of hanging pots and pans overhead, is further testimony that Roostertail is no kin to the colonel. With the exception of French fries, there’s nothing fried on the menu. And speaking of menus, Simmons outdid himself here: Every dish has its description on a magnetic tile for simple daily updating.

Roostertail has also added a new twist on food to go. Call ahead, pay with a credit card and a “takeout concierge” will dash out and hand off your meal, saving the hassle of finding a parking space.

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EARLIER: “Scooter street food on Fillmore”

The first parklet in the neighborhood — in front of Delfina Pizzeria at 2410 California Street near Fillmore — is now accepting visitors. It’s a new public space that offers a spot to pause in the sunshine.

EARLIER: “Parklet sprouting on California Street“

ORNITHOLOGY | Monte Travis

From my ninth floor office near Lafayette Park, I’ve been watching a pair of red-tailed hawks engage in aerial courtship flights since early this year.

In late March I saw the hawks carrying sticks to a large nest high in a eucalyptus tree in the park, undertaking a little remodeling. A few days later, I observed one of the hawks poking its head above the rim of the nest. This suggested at least one egg and probably more had been laid in the nest. If all goes well, we should have chicks in about a month.

As I was photographing the female hawk on the nest, I was alerted by the screams of about 20 red-masked parakeets — the famous parrots of Telegraph Hill — who suddenly bolted into the air from the treetops directly overhead. I looked up, and there came the male redtail swooping in from the west. When the male arrived at the nest, the female, who is larger, rose up, and for a short time both stood on the nest (above). Then the female took off and the male settled in for his shift.  

Redtails are monogamous and generally mate for life. But later that same day, I witnessed a mystery: three adult birds on the nest (below). For 45 minutes, all three alternately flew to and from the nest. A menage a trois, perhaps? Or maybe redtails, like certain other species, sometimes employ one of their young from the prior year as a helper. This will bear watching in the coming days.

It’s a domestic ornithological mystery. But it seems appropriate for San Francisco: an alternative avian family.

When architect Michael Murphy came home to San Francisco after a decade in London, his fresh eyes gave him a new appreciation for the city’s architecture — especially the modern buildings that often get overshadowed by the showier Victorians.

So he began creating a series of prints celebrating some of his personal favorites, including several in the neighborhood. There’s the new St. Mary’s Cathedral (“one of the most beautiful spaces in San Francisco,” he says) and the Japantown pagoda (“simple, with cherry blossom pink”), modern Pacific Heights (“it’s cocktail time”) and even daytime and nighttime tributes to the much-maligned Jack Tar Hotel on Van Ness Avenue.

“It’s reinvigorated my notion that people are suckers for architecture,” Murphy says. “They love it and they love to hate it.”

The entire series is available at Zinc Details, the emporium of modern design at 1905 Fillmore Street, and on Murphy’s website.

“They’re a hit,” Murphy chuckles. “My art has overtaken my architecture.”

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Crowds gather outside Delfina Pizzeria on California near Fillmore nearly every day at noon and nighttime. They’re waiting for a table, preferably one of the coveted spots out front.

Soon the waiting may be more convivial — and the odds of snagging an outside table considerably improved — when the Fillmore Stoop is completed. It’s the first parklet in the neighborhood — and one of the few with a proper name — although the take-back-the-pavement mini-parks are already a big hit in North Beach, on Divisadero and especially along Valencia Street. They transform one or two parking spots into a public space, usually with tables and chairs and a bit of greenery.

The Fillmore Stoop is the creation of Jessica Weigley and Kevin Hackett, architects whose firm, Siol Studios, is at Fillmore and Clay. Their proposal takes the parklet idea a step further by creating sculptural benches and planters in two parking spots, with room for four or five tables from Delfina. They gained the endorsement of neighboring businesses and persuaded Chase Bank — coming soon across the street — to pony up $25,000 to cover construction costs.

The city has approved the plans and issued permits. Most of the work will be done off-site, with installation in late March or early April.

John Field designed the six shingled row houses at 2641-63 Union Street.

ARCHITECTURE | John Field

Although I’ve lived in Pacific Heights for many years and designed homes here, I never thought of myself as a Pacific Heights architect. When I was asked recently how many houses in the neighborhood I have designed, I had to stop and think. I’d never counted them.

There must be 20 or more, most of them published in Sunset or House and Garden. Alas, they aren’t easy to pick out. There’s no unique window style, no striking modern minimalism; San Francisco wouldn’t stand for such statements in the 1960s and 70s. I designed gracious modern housing, most of it blending in with shingles or hiding behind a Victorian exterior. Even then some of the matrons of Pacific Heights thought my designs were out of place.

They may have had a point. I used bay windows in designs that weren’t Victorian, shingle walls as if they were white plaster, and glass wherever there was a view. I turned a ballroom for a mansion into a three-story home and carved parking out of many existing residences, one of them still with a fireplace, mantle and marble trim in the garage.

The real art of designing in San Francisco has always been capitalizing on whatever view there is, while concealing the exposures that aren’t so good. That’s true for city living everywhere.

Within three blocks on Broadway, I designed three completely new houses that are visually related only by their proportions. On the surrounding blocks are eight or 10 irreverently remodeled Victorians, two of them for my own family.

Probably my best known local project is a group of six shingled row houses at 2641-2663 Union Street. The design provoked a storm of protest from neighbors, who feared their property would be devalued by these houses only 16 feet wide — not realizing their own Victorians were often no wider, although built on wider lots. The design was published in several magazines and won many awards, including a special governor’s award for contemporary California design.

As in all cities, the housing stock is limited in Pacific Heights. New owners want to make their houses their own, so they remodel. People live differently now than they did before, and their houses reflect the changes. But I still harbor a hope that some of the simple elegant spirit of the places I have designed will live on.

Read more: “Architect, filmmaker, now a photographer“

Photograph of Vasilios Kiniris at Zinc Details by Drew Altizer

Q & A | Vasilios Kiniris

Zinc Details has turned 20. How did it all begin?

I was fresh out of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California at Berkeley and simply had an idea and some very strong feelings. At the university, Wendy Nishimura and I had developed an understanding and shared a passion for the modern classics of furniture design. In travels to Europe and Japan, we came face to face with new styles hatched from traditional forms. And naturally, we began to form strong relationships with young artisans and designers in the San Francisco Bay Area who were creating excitement with simply styled, highly functional and innovative pieces.

What led you to put your architectural education to use in a retail design store?

It takes a long time for architecture to actually be realized and influence a person’s life. Retail design is a lot more immediate. You can touch people on an everyday level. Personally, we love to collect, admire and interact with beautifully designed products and the store is a reflection of our vision and taste. Having the knowledge of history of architecture and art is also a great reference when dealing with modern design products. All products designed today have references to the past. We can appreciate all the thought process put in to develop the products. And even when creating a display, we can visualize space relations to the products better.

Were you always focused on modern design — and didn’t that put you 10 years ahead of the curve?

From the beginning, the idea was to offer home and office furnishings that had integrity and lasting value. Pieces were selected not because they seemed trendy, but because they had the potential to be contemporary classics, things that carried the elan of treasured modern design — the best of Scandinavian, Italian, Japanese and American ideas.

Now mid-century modern is all the rage. You told us so?

Historically, in the ’50s and ’60s, new appreciation for home design developed and was popularized all across America. It’s no surprise that now mid-century design is back in style and ever more popular because many people are already familiar with the style from when they were young.

What led you to locate on Fillmore Street?

Our first store was on Post Street — well into the Tenderloin, to be exact. It was a tiny 200 square space, and then this freakish accident happened: a huge gas explosion right across from the store. We lost a lot of merchandise and that was the wake up call to look for a larger and safer space. Also, at that time we were invited to create a “shop within a store” at the Macy’s Union Square location. Because of the wider exposure, we attained a larger audience and they wanted to see a larger selection from us.

In 1994, the store moved from Post Street to its present location at 1905 Fillmore Street. The move to Fillmore brought Zinc into one of the most popular shopping streets in San Francisco, with vastly increased foot traffic and an additional 1,000 square feet of showroom space. In the enlarged Zinc Details, we were able to increase the product range to include work from both national and international talent and to expand the in-house product line.

And then you doubled down on Fillmore by expanding next door into the Big Pagoda space.

Correct. In 2003, we took over the retail space next door, more than doubling our retail space, allowing us to add further lines of internationally known furniture such as Knoll, Kartell, Herman Miller.

And then you doubled down again and opened a second store around the corner on California Street, just when other home design stores were closing. What were you thinking?

We went through many shifts in our business during the past 20 years. In 2001, manufacturing was changing and the major production was moving overseas, so we had to decide to focus on retail or wholesale business. That’s when we opened our second location on Fourth Street in Berkeley. Again our business was shifting and we wanted to create a space of mainly a furniture showroom. We had the opportunity to obtain the 2410 California location at that time and it made sense for us to have two stores closer to each other than across the bay, so we closed the Berkeley store.

But after opening the California Street location, we found that many of our customers didn’t want to make a trip to visit two stores, even though we were only two blocks apart. And after acquiring many designers and architect clients through the California Street location, we decided to shift our business once again to focus on furniture. So last summer we closed our California Street location and packed and moved everything back to our original 1905 Fillmore Street location. Now we can offer a great furniture collection and home accessories at one location, but with more curated visions. Our customers enjoy the convenience of one-stop shopping and it’s much better for me as owner to be in one location and to get to know everyone who comes through the door.

What’s special about Fillmore?

It’s a unique neighborhood with small, independent stores and restaurants. Having a neighborhood store allows for closer ties with customers, many of whom live, work and shop in the area. In fact, I’d say 60 percent of our clients are from the neighborhood, 25 percent are from the rest of the city, 10 percent from the Bay Area and 5 percent are visitors.

Any plans for the new year?

We’re planning to have design movie night, do-it-yourself classes and design discussion panels.

Self Portrait (1977) by Joan Brown

ART | Jerome Tarshis

Joan Brown (1938-1990) may have thought of herself as an unclassifiable artist. “This Kind of Bird Flies Backward,” the survey of her paintings at the San Jose Museum of Art through March 11, positions her as one who portrayed women’s lives, beginning with her own. Curators need to say something, but it’s an idea that hardly narrows things down. A woman is called upon to play many parts — and Brown tells us that she enjoyed most of them.

Joan Brown (nee Beatty) was born in San Francisco and received a Catholic education through high school. Her teachers seemed to offer her a choice between becoming a nun or becoming a 1950s wife and mother. By sheer chance, she saw an ad for the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute, visited its campus, saw people with beards and sandals, and thought an entirely different world had been opened to her.

As a child, she had played with paper dolls, putting different costumes on a single figure, and as a teenager she had copied photographs of glamorous movie actresses. When she applied to art school, the drawings of actresses were enough to secure her admission. They were girlish rather than feminist, but they prefigured much of her career, which was dedicated to making a body of work that was a journal of a woman’s life far more than it was a product offered for sale.

For a time Brown considered herself the least qualified of art students and thought of dropping out until one of her teachers, Elmer Bischoff, changed her sense of what she could do. Bischoff told her that she didn’t need to master academic drawing — that experience would teach her what she needed to know. And as for what to paint, a cup of coffee in her studio was a perfectly legitimate subject for art.

She became enormously successful. The paintings of her student years, much admired at school, brought her to the attention of an outstanding gallery in New York, where she sold a painting to the Museum of Modern Art in her early twenties. In San Francisco at that time, being a woman artist was no great handicap; in lifetime career terms, both Brown and her next-door neighbor on Fillmore Street, Jay DeFeo, outstripped their artist husbands, Bill Brown and Wally Hedrick.

Brown was notable for getting paint on herself; she seemed almost eager to look like a mess. But she also enjoyed being pretty and dressing up, and the show includes a painting in which she and her third husband, Gordon Cook, are on their way to a performance of San Francisco Opera.

One of the most teasing works in the show, a summation of cliches about women and women artists but also an example of her refusal to be only one thing or only another, is Self-Portrait (1977). In it, Brown sits in her studio, painting a still life of a flower, and instead of wearing a paint-stained artist’s smock, she is wearing a handsome dress and high-heeled shoes and looks as if she has dressed for
a party.

Her paintings tell us that she could embrace the most varied possibilities: she could be physically strong, as a long-distance swimmer; she could be a painter; she could be a wife or mother or lover; by the 1980s, she could be a spiritual seeker in India. For her, at least, there was never any contradiction between looking terrific in high heels and being a serious, successful, and, if one wants to use the adjective, feminist painter.

Photograph of Joan Brown by Jerry Burchard

JOAN BROWN: PART OF THE FILLMORE SCENE

Joan Brown’s involvement with the art scene along Fillmore Street began with exhibitions, while she was still an art student, first at the Six Gallery, at 3119 Fillmore, then at the Spatsa Gallery, on Filbert Street near Fillmore.

In 1958, Brown and her husband Bill Brown moved into the apartment building at 2322 Fillmore, where their next-door neighbors were the painters Wally Hedrick and Jay DeFeo. Famous as some of them are today, San Francisco artists of the 1950s had little hope of being exhibited by major galleries or museums. Bruce Conner once said that the art of that time was not made to last because nobody needed it to last. Brown herself has said, “It was important for that day, for that week, or for that moment.”

The seeming lack of any path to success encouraged a deliberate hostility to the art market and its institutions. Life at 2322 Fillmore was characterized by heavy drinking, resourceful parties and the view that making artwork was something like a meditative exercise, to be enjoyed in the present with little thought for the future.

Joan Brown had come a long way from her Catholic high school days. After a time, however, the hard partying became oppressive; quiet and privacy began to look good. In 1959, she separated from Bill Brown and moved to North Beach to live with the artist Manuel Neri, who became her second husband.

Theophilus Brown, Self Portrait, 1994

Neighborhood resident Theophilus Brown — one of the great figures in 20th century California art and one of the pioneering members of the Bay Area Figurative Movement — at 92 is still in his studio every day. A new exhibition opening tonight, “Theophilus Brown: An Artful Life,” presents work from throughout his long and successful career. The exhibition begins with an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. tonight at the Thomas Reynolds Gallery at 2291 Pine Street, near Fillmore.

Read more: “A friendship with Theophilus Brown,” by Matt Gonzalez

Murals at Fillmore and Geary were overtaken by graffiti after a new bus shelter was installed.

By Kellie Ell

A once vibrant mural on the south side of the Boom Boom Room at Fillmore and Geary is now covered in gold, hot pink and white spray paint and other graffiti. Looming above, the next-door National Dollar store has painted its name and a parade of products it sells — soda, crackers, ketchup, sugar and toilet bowl cleaner — all intermixed with graffiti.

Alexander Andreas, owner of the Boom Boom Room, says the mural depicting jazz musicians on his building went undamaged for six years. But now it is “totally tagged,” he says, and vandals have also etched graffiti into the glass walls and top of the new designer bus shelter and smashed its back wall.

Andreas blames the rise in vandalism on the recent repositioning of the 38-Geary  bus shelter. Before it was at the curb. Now it is backed up against the wall of the Boom Boom Room, providing shelter for taggers to deface property out of sight.

“It’s absurd,” he says. “The city did a disservice. The move has triggered an onslaught of graffiti hitting my mural.”

A spokesman for the Municipal Transportation Agency says the shelter was moved to provide the sidewalk access required for the disabled.

The owner of the National Dollar store, who would give his name only as Freddy, says graffiti has been “a really big problem” in the five years since he opened at 1633 Fillmore. He says vandals have repeatedly climbed on the roof of the Boom Boom Room to tag his wall, so he had it partially painted with different products he sells.

“Murals are beautiful works of art, and people appreciate that,” he says.

But art is in the eye of the beholder, and some say his attempt to create a mural may actually be attracting graffiti.

“It looks like a lot of noise at that corner,” Andreas says of what he calls the dollar store’s “cheap-o job” of depicting the commercial products it sells. “The mural looks so tacky. I don’t think they care about the beautification of the Fillmore.”

Noisy or not, apparently it’s legal. According to the city’s billboard ordinance, general advertising of commercial products is allowed on billboards — or murals — on a store if the items are sold on the premises, according to John Purvis of the San Francisco Planning Department.

Above the Boom Boom Room's mural is a parade of products sold at the dollar store.

But graffiti, however artful, is not legal.

Andreas says he recently received a letter from the city directing him to clean up the side of his building or risk a fine. According to a 2004 graffiti removal measure, property owners and landlords are required to clean up graffiti within 30 days or face a penalty of up to $500. Those charged must remedy the problem or pay the city to do it.

The dollar store owner says he has repeatedly repainted the south wall of his building, only to have it “graffitied again and again and again” by people climbing onto the roof of the Boom Boom Room.

“I clean it up and two weeks later I have to climb up there again,” he says. “My job is to clean it up or I get fined by the city.”

Andreas says he has tried to collaborate with his neighbor on a more attractive mural that would cover both walls, to no avail.

The owner of the dollar store says he is working with Melonie Green of Infin8 Sync, a production company and art space in the Fillmore, to find the right artist to paint a bigger mural.

Green says something as simple as lettering saying “The Fillmore” could be enough to deter vandalism — and promote the neighborhood as well. Some murals created as a way to deter graffiti have worked, she says, but others have not.
Green says some taggers don’t understand the unwritten rules that say street artists shouldn’t touch murals.

Law enforcement officials are also equivocal. Officer Martin Ferreira, of the police department’s graffiti abatement program, says he has noticed a decrease in vandalism on walls with murals. He admits, however, that it’s hit and miss. “No matter how beautiful a piece of artwork may appear, if it’s unwanted, it can cause people a lot of stress,” he says. Graffiti is most effectively deterred, he says, by proper lighting, surveillance cameras and foot traffic.

One success story — at least so far — is nearby at Les Croissants Cafe, located behind the Boom Boom Room at 1840 Geary. Owner Tommy Ly says his eatery has had no tagging in the months since he hired a well-known local graffiti artist to paint a mural on the cafe.

A mural by a graffiti artist at Les Croissants Cafe has not been vandalized.