Down the block from the postcard row of Painted Ladies in Alamo Square, the real estate developer behind three new post-Victorian homes on Steiner Street is still insisting that we refer to the project by the regrettable, buzzwordy name he came up with: "The Painted Gentlemen." In fact, they've even plastered it on the side of the Probert House next door with a handy dotcom suffix.
According to an infomercial for the new homes, Bartlett Real Estate has gone to great lengths with their architects and the Planning Department to make sure the project is a hit in the neighborhood. A nice sentiment, and yet, somehow, in the year and a half since we first caught wind of it, no one has given them the phone number of a branding agency that could come up with a name that didn't remind us of a theme tent at Burning Man or "images of certain Bay to Breakers participants" — which the neighbors ought to be intimately familiar with.
Unlike most NIMBY situations, however, the houses themselves aren't the problem. The latest renderings actually look fairly inoffensive. Actually, aside from having pitched roofs, they don't exactly have much in common with their (ahem) sisters up the block.
Anyway, with the banner in place over Steiner Street, the name ought to catch on at least with the droves of tourists in open-top tour buses who don't know the Full House house was actually over on Broderick Street. The rest of us, on the other hand, will just have to agree to call them by their street addresses like normal human beings who live in boring, old nameless apartments.
