San Francisco Citizen

[UPDATE: "Carefully refurbished?" That's up for debate. But "lakeside?" Hell no. How about State-Highway-One-side instead? Seep into the woods of these great estates to see for yourself if you want. "Honey, where's the lake? Isn't there supposed to be a lake?"]

Our Presidio Trust is working towards sustainability and the refurbished Wyman Avenue residences are going to be a part of that.

Read on for a report about the first official Open House the John Stewart Company just had over Burning Man / Labor Day Weekend.

First up, here’s the news. Monthly rental prices have been set for all the duplexes (the ones with letters in the addresses) at about $5500 per month, mas or menos. And Minimum Bid price floors have been set for the three single family residences. See?

Mmmm, the minimum price set for 1809, the smallest non-duplex, is the outlier here. 1811 is twice the house of 1809 (IMO, of course – square footage-wise, it’s 63% more house), but the minimum bid price for 1811 is only 11% higher. Mmmm.

Etude sur le mise-en-scene:

But guess what, you can see these places yourself on:

“Wednesday, September 8 from 11am to 3pm.”

Uh oh, here come the Lexuseses – it must be time for Open House!

Click to expand

There’s no good place to lock up your bike, so oh well:

Here’s the front view on WymanAvenue – lots of dogs were about, despite the “no pets” policy for renters. (There might have been more than a few looky-lou dog-walkers about – I talked to some of them myself.)

Now, it’s time for some interiors:

Here’s a kitchen (from Building 1811, the pick of the litter at 10K plus per month):

…and a bath:

…and a living room:

(Man, I’d want to take a hacksaw to the pipe on that hanging light fixture to get the bottom of it above the altitude of my melon…)

….and a master bedroom way up high on the third floor:

And the “unfinished” basement of 1809, well it’s just awesome. They don’t even count this space in the square footage:

You could have quite the workshop (or ping pong tournament) down there. Plenty of square footage:

But, mind the humidity:

Now all that’s all fine and dandy, but it seems a few shortcuts were taken during the long process of refurbishment. For example, this window doesn’t have weatherstripping, so it closes unevenly:

Compare that with what you get at the recently remade LandMark Presidio apartments just down the road. They’ve taken the time to make sure the gaps are plugged  over there. See?

Anyway, back to Wyman Ave…

Some of the fittings are what you call “builder’s grade.” Straight-out-of-Home-Depot is good enough for me, but I don’t think this plastic stuff here is necessarily green and I don’t think it matches the historic nature or whatnot of this $10k+ per month rental unit. So what’s it doing here?  

The cheapest closet light pull-cord-stretchy-string and aluminum stopper-bobber you could imagine:

Are we done here? I don’t know. Maybe they’ll get to adding a globe around this exterior light or maybe they won’t:

And here’s your PVC / copper interchange. All right…

And don’t look now, but they have PG&E SmartMeters all over. (Can you see the EMF symbol part of the SmartMeter logo  on this gas mater? Wow, that wasn’t the right choice for PG&E to make back in the day. But since this meter doesn’t have an LCD display, you can’t really tell what makes it new and special except for the knowledge that it transmits wirelessly. Of course, it’s those wireless transmissions that people are most upset about. Oh well.) 

Now, if you’re into it, you better act fast, is all I can say.

They’ll take a bid going up to something like five years on the houses. I’m thinking that the longer rental terms are what they’re referring to by the phrase ”Rent Escalation Factor.”

So something like this: 

“I’ll pay the John Stewart Company $11k/mo this year, 12k/mo next year, etc…”

So that’s the tour. Maybe one of these places is for you, I don’t know.

You might just love living here…

Ever more deets, after the jump

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