Believe it not, Peter Marino is an unabashed romantic. Yes, that Peter Marino: the AD100 Hall of Fame architect and designer, he of the artfully inked epidermis, shiny Harley-Davidsons and Ducatis, and black leather, biker-chic ensembles. Give the maestro a historic property
with a star-studded backstory, and he turns to putty.
“You just sort of gulp,” Marino explains of projects like the sprawling 1916 San Francisco mansion that he labored on for more than three years, overhauling its nearly two dozen rooms for effervescent East Coast transplants with three teenagers, two French bulldogs, and a passion for pedigreed real estate. The husband and wife also possessed phenomenal sangfroid, accepting with barely a blink the seismic requirements that demanded gutting the house and driving concrete pilings 30 feet into the ground. “It was a Herculean task,” Marino continues. “There was no roof, the exterior walls were under boarding, and there were no floor slabs. It all looks so pretty now, but it was painful.” And, he quips with a laugh, “if there’s an earthquake anywhere in North America, from Vancouver to Teotihuacán, for God’s sake run here.”