By Lisa Gordon
One of the things I love about San Francisco is the color. It’s everywhere: from murals in hidden alleyways to the bright shades of the houses that line our streets. A leisurely stroll in this city could put your Crayola colors knowledge to the test. Ever wonder how or why they all got that way? For many of them, you can thank Dr. Color.
Yes, that’s really his name. Well, his real name is Bob Buckter, but he signs his emails and refers to himself as Dr. Color.
If you’re in the habit of admiring colorful homes and buildings around here, you may have noticed his name on the plaques he sometimes uses to identify his work: Bob Buckter, Color Consultant, www.drcolor.com. I noticed them from time to time until my interest got the better of me, so I went to his website and was surprised: it’s curiously outdated. After meeting with him, I learned that Dr. Color is in his late 60s. He’s been painting in San Francisco for more than 40 years, and he’s completed more than 22,500 projects in the city and Bay Area. Yes, 22,500! There’s a good chance you walk by his work every day.
Bob does commercial, industrial, and residential structures with an emphasis on historic buildings, and he’s worked on 100 landmarks like Julius Castle (now closed) and the Haas Lilienthal House. You can see his work on countless residential buildings and homes, including his own house on 20th Street – directly overlooking Dolores Park – which boasts 11 colors. His designs have won local and national awards, and are featured in the Painted Ladies books by Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen. His favorite project to date is 115 Oak Street. It has since changed several times, but in 1976 he transformed it with midnight blue, a creamy off-white trim, and accents in burgundy, yellow, and gold.
But let’s be clear about one thing: Dr. Color doesn’t actually paint. Not anymore, anyway. In 1970, Dr. Color (who is a rare breed of SF native – he was born here and grew up in the Sunset), burned out on school, and his friend, a house painter, hired him for $1.35 an hour. After his second week, he was fired for not knowing what he was doing. But he kept going on his own, and realized he had a “knack for choosing colors.” When he got too busy with painting jobs, he figured he’d try to see if, instead of painting the entire structure, he could just “talk people into colors.” At the time, he thought, who would pay someone just to choose colors? But they kept calling back, and his reputation grew.
A few years later, in the early ’70s, he decided he was just going to do facades. In other words, he says, “I got cocky.” His parents, a bookkeeper mom and milk truck deliveryman dad, who had originally wanted him to get a “white collar” job, couldn’t argue with his increasing success. At the age of 28, just a few years later, he’d made a million dollars. In 1977, he retired to “sail around the world,” and when he came back, he thought, what do you do? So he began color consulting, and Dr. Color was (re)born.
He explains his work in pretty simple terms. He talks to his clients about what they like and don’t like. “If they don’t like green, I don’t do green,” he says. He also looks at what’s next door and elsewhere along the street so that it fits into the streetscape. He aims for “good taste.” He explains, “When most people see something, they like it. Bad taste is when most people see something, they don’t like it. That’s my definition, anyway. I don’t know what anyone else’s is.”
Dr. Color does not consider himself an artist. Instead, he says he’s a colorist. Though matter-of-fact and professional, he waxes poetic about color and what it can do, explaining how it can point out different aspects of architecture, dropping terms like “polychromatic.”
He’s also, arguably, colorful himself. Recently when consulting for a historic city building, he was asked to research the original colors. “Why would I research the original colors of the building when the original colors could be ugly?” he asked, adding, “this is San Francisco!”
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, other painters and colorist outfits began working around the same time as Dr. Color using bright, surprising colors to revamp the abundant Victorian-era homes in the city, known somewhat unofficially as “The Colorist Movement.” The others attribute the movement to various things, but if you ask Dr. Color about it, he’ll cite reasons that may seem more obvious: the ’60s, psychedelic colors, and acid. “That’s how it really started,” he says.
Today, the cityscape looks different than it did during Dr. Color’s heyday. It looks different than it did just a few years ago. Construction is everywhere; there are new businesses and condo buildings going up every day, and with them, an influx of people looking to call this beautiful city home. More buildings, you’d think, would mean more color. Instead, it’s just the opposite.
“All those high-end condos that are on the market now – they all want gray. Everyone’s going for gray,” he says. In 2008 when the economy collapsed, he lost half his business and it hasn’t come back much since. Now, he has to appeal to a sophisticated market that has money. “And they’re not spending money on color,” he says.
Despite that, he’s still in demand, producing 300 or so jobs per year. Right now, he’s working on the property at 400 Duboce, which, according to him, is the largest wooden structure in the city. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I’m happy to take his word for it.
Now, there are lots of others out there who call themselves color consultants. If you google them, they’re easy to find. They may have slicker websites, but none, he says, have been at it as long as he has. Dr. Color doesn’t advertise, except for a colorful truck with his name on it and those plaques I noticed, and he relies mostly on referrals. He says what keeps people coming back is how the work affects them. “The colors of a home can change the attitude of the people living inside it. They like living inside of those colors.”
If I’m ever lucky enough to own real estate in this city (haha!), I’d love to live inside the colors. But for now, at least, I’m happy just to look at them. They’re part of what helps to make this city, well, colorful.