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What was destroyed in less than 45 seconds during the Great San Francisco Earthquake in 1906 has taken decades to rebuild at one of Palo Alto’s oldest homes.
After the shaking toppled a chimney and tore away the Queen Anne’s distinctive round lookout tower at the top corner of the three-story house, the structure was never replaced. Owners rebuilt the chimney, but the tower — called a belvedere — remained missing from the home’s facade for nearly 120 years.
The ornate structure is finally returning to the historic home as part of a three-year restoration project at the A.G. Herzinger House at 1023 Forest Ave., where crews have been rebuilding and seismically reinforcing the 1896 residence inside and out.
Though still under construction, the tower is already visible from the street, topped by a bell-shaped roof, finial and weathervane and decorative columns flanking the porch. The structure is just one sign of the extensive restoration work underway throughout the property.
During a recent walk-through of the Queen Anne, it was clear that not an inch of the house has been left untouched. Contractors have stripped plaster walls back to the studs, revealing the original redwood framing throughout the interior. Along one staircase, remnants of green floral wallpaper once hidden behind later wainscoting still run up sections of the wall to the second story. In the attic, stair rails, porch columns, balusters and other salvaged architectural details sit in organized piles, waiting to be touched up and put back in place.
At the front of the house, workers also uncovered a fan-shaped stained-glass window hidden inside a wall near the chimney. It has since been restored.
“This is not your typical project,” said general contractor Jim Parden of Parden Construction.
What began as a seismic upgrade quickly grew into one of the largest historic preservation efforts of his career, said Parden as he donned a hardhat in the attic and pointed to the massive steel reinforcement beams running through all three stories of the home and into the basement. He said the project started with stabilizing the house and grew into a full restoration.
The work has transformed nearly every surface of the home, said Lee I. Lippert of Palo Alto’s Lippert & Lippert Design, who is the architect leading the historic restoration work.
“Even as crews modernize the building, the goal has remained to preserve the home as a window into Palo Alto’s past,” Lippert said. “It is really quite extraordinary that the new owners are bringing the home back to its original architectural look of a Queen Anne house.”
Lippert added that restoration at this scale is never straightforward. Over time, many original features were altered or replaced, and the team has worked to determine what can be accurately replicated.
“If we can’t replicate something accurately, we’d rather do something clearly different than create confusion about what’s original,” Lippert explained.
WANT TO SEE THE HERZINGER HOUSE IN PERSON? Mark your calendar for a free walking tour exploring the historic Boyce-Ashby neighborhood on May 31.
Boyce-Ashby Addition walking tour
10 a.m., Sunday, May 31
Meet at 1101 Fife Ave.
The public can learn more about the Herzinger House and view the restoration work from the sidewalk during a free walking tour hosted by Palo Alto Stanford Heritage on Sunday, May 31.
The tour begins at 10 a.m. at 1101 Fife Ave. and explores the Boyce-Ashby Addition neighborhood, home to some of Palo Alto’s most elaborate 19th-century houses built just outside the city’s original 1890s boundaries. The Herzinger House will be viewed from the public sidewalk only; the property is not open to visitors.
Replicating the home’s features has required extensive “architectural forensics,” said Lippert, who has spent the better half of the past three years tracking down clues on how nearly every architectural detail of the original home once looked.
Because the home was built before detailed permits or formal building codes existed, there are few records to guide the work. Very little survives on paper.
This means estimating original dimensions and reconstructing missing elements often requires finding bits of information here and there rather than relying on complete plans. Lippert’s work has involved peeling back layers of paint and building materials to uncover the home’s original design and construction methods, studying old photographs and tracking down vintage design catalogues to identify historically accurate patterns for tiles and other details.
“I haven’t slept in three years,” Lippert said.
A view looking up at the belvedere’s unfinished vaulted ceiling. Photo by Seeger Gray. 
Blueprints for the belvedere. Photo by Seeger Gray. 
A view of the unfinished belvedere from the attic. Photo by Seeger Gray. 
Members of the restoration team install the finial and weathervane on the belvedere. Photo courtesy Lee I. Lippert. 
A replica of the original decorative chimney tile destroyed in 1906. Photo by Seeger Gray.
The story behind the Herzinger House
Built in 1896 for about $6,500, the Herzinger House is one of Palo Alto’s oldest surviving homes and among the city’s finest examples of Queen Anne Victorian architecture. The ornate three-story residence features a wraparound porch, balconies, towers and decorative detailing characteristic of the late-Victorian style. It also was among the city’s earliest homes built with indoor plumbing, central heating and an oil-fired furnace, according to the preservation group Palo Alto Stanford Heritage (PAST).
The 4,516-square-foot home is listed as a Category 2 historic resource on Palo Alto’s historic inventory, a designation reserved for major buildings of regional importance. Agnes G. Herzinger commissioned architect C.H. Barrett and contractor M.P. Madison to build the house after relocating to California following the death of her husband, a Colorado miner. At the time, the property stood on the edge of unincorporated Palo Alto, when Boyce and Hale streets marked the city limits, Lippert said. After the 1906 earthquake, the family left Palo Alto, and the home later cycled through a series of owners, at times sitting vacant and briefly serving as a dormitory for Menlo College, according to PAST.
The current owners, who grew up around historic homes on the East Coast, purchased the property during the pandemic and wanted to return the home to its former glory, launching one of the most extensive preservation and seismic rehabilitation efforts in the home’s nearly 130-year history, according to Lippert.
Balancing history with seismic upgrades
Much of the challenge of restoring the historic home came down to bringing the house up to modern seismic standards while keeping all of the structural work completely out of sight, so the home still looks as it did more than a century ago.
The rehabilitation project included rebuilding the home’s roof framing, foundation, basement and seismic support systems.
According to Lippert, one of the biggest hurdles was stabilizing the structure itself. The original roof framing was not strong enough for today’s building standards, so engineers reinforced it to make it stronger. But that added strength also came with added weight, which created new seismic stresses elsewhere in the building.
To address that, engineers installed shear walls and steel beams that run from the foundation all the way to the roofline. The system strengthens the entire structure but is fully hidden within the walls.
Workers also rebuilt the home’s unreinforced masonry basement and crawlspace walls with a new concrete foundation designed to better withstand earthquakes and flooding.
But while much of the work has been structural, the restoration’s most visible changes are architectural.
Tapered rope columns and Scamozzi capitals were reproduced using generative AI. Photo by Seeger Gray. 
An artist hand-sculpts molds for decorative panels that will ring the restoredbelvedere.Courtesy Lee I. Lippert. 
A member of the restoration team uses a laser scanner to create 3-D computer models of the home’s surviving columns that will be used to recreate matching pieces for the belvedere. Photo acourtesy Lee I. Lippert. 
Workers uncovered this leaded stained-glass window behind a wall. Photo courtesy Lee I. Lippert.
Using AI to rebuild the past
After the home was structurally reinforced, crews could begin rebuilding some of the architectural features that were once part of the original Queen Anne, including the third-story belvedere.
Lippert and his team searched old files at the Palo Alto Historical Association and the city’s building department to find any clues on what the structure might have looked like, but neither had drawings of the original house.
They finally came across a photograph of the home taken before the 1906 earthquake that showed the missing belvedere and its intricate details.
Lippert said the team was able to use generative artificial intelligence tools to analyze the historic photograph and approximate spatial relationships and proportions, as well as other architectural details that no longer existed. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can generate missing or deteriorated elements in a photo, among other things.
“People talk about the threat of artificial intelligence, but in this case, generative AI helped restore and replicate important elements of the house,” Lippert said. “This would have been far more difficult a decade ago.”
Lippert said the early photograph revealed that the belvedere’s tapered rope columns and ornate Scamozzi capitals (a type of column top with four curved scrolls) matched some of the pieces still intact on the home’s second-story porch.
To recreate the missing columns and capitals, the restoration team stripped paint from the best-preserved originals and laser-scanned them to create 3-D computer models, which were then used to mill replacement parts from engineered wood. The recreated pieces now also help conceal modern steel supports inside the restored belvedere.
The work on the belvedere had to follow strict preservation standards, according to Lippert.
Preservation standards discourage creating “false history,” Lippert said, meaning reconstructed elements should not be mistaken for original materials. That’s why the team went to exhaustive lengths to find the exact dimensions, thickness and other details of the materials originally used.
The belvedere’s roof, however, was a different story. The team purposely chose a material that was very different from the original design after deciding not to replicate the home’s cedar shingle roof for fire safety and other reasons. Lippert said he opted to use copper for the belvedere, so it would not be mistaken for original construction.
But material choice solved only part of the problem. The harder question was shape — how to recreate the unique curved form of a roof that no one had ever seen in person.
While visiting family in Connecticut, Lippert found inspiration in an unlikely place: a bell-shaped gazebo at Olde Mystic Village, a recreated New England town on the state’s southeastern coast. He paired that image with a historic photograph of the house to develop a workable design for the belvedere’s curved roofline.
To recreate the belvedere’s finial and weathervane, the team used the surviving finial from the home’s conical turret as a reference point. They scaled historic photographs to determine that the original belvedere finial — or decorative spire — was roughly 25% larger, with similar proportions but a more elongated profile.
Fabricated in copper to match the belvedere’s roof, the new finial was mounted on a steel support tube anchored to the structure’s framing. Because it also functions as a lightning rod, it is electrically isolated from the building steel and tied into grounding cables that run down to a grounding rod at the foundation, Lippert explained.
One of the project’s most intricate decorative elements was the Vitruvian acanthus leaf frieze, which features curling foliage and a scroll-like wave design. The sculpted horizontal frieze wrapped the belvedere’s entablature – an architectural element that sits directly on top of columns in classical and neoclassical architecture.
Using generative AI, the team once again analyzed the pre-1906 photograph to interpret the missing pattern and generate a scaled computer-aided design (CAD) drawing. Artists at the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, South Carolina, then used the design to hand-sculpt molds and cast 25 decorative panels that will ring the restored structure.
Lippert said the home’s chimneys posed another major challenge. Engineers determined the aging masonry chimneys were vulnerable to collapse in a future earthquake, requiring crews to rebuild them using lighter modern construction hidden beneath historically accurate finishes.
Recreating the decorative chimney surfaces required another round of architectural forensics. The historic photograph showed recessed terra cotta tile inlays common in late-19th-century masonry. While searching old trade catalogues online one night, the team discovered what appeared to be the home’s original acanthus leaf tile pattern in a pre-1896 Gladding, McBean & Company catalogue. The company was still in operation, but these particular tiles were no longer manufactured, so a Southern California artisan recreated them by hand from the historic image.
The rebuilt chimney arches also conceal modern engineering. Instead of solid brick, the arches were formed using a section of vitrified clay pipe hidden beneath thin brick cladding and held in place by a steel frame. The design replicates the original appearance while reducing seismic risk, Lippert explained.
Much of the structural and restoration work is nearing completion. Earlier this month, crews were putting the finishing touches on the landscaping, decks and a new garage.
The owners are expected to move into the home this fall, with construction slated to wrap up around October, coinciding with the home’s 130th anniversary.
