San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
BLOOM & BUST OF FLOWER HOUSE IN S.F.
Sunset District home’s cheerful mural epitomizes the fleeting nature of social media celebrity
Everyone wants to be liked on social media, but sometimes insta-fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The story of the Sunset District’s short-lived Flower House (@sfflowerhouse), a since-painted-over mural project that was briefly a social media destination, shows just how fleeting social-celebrity can be in San Francisco.
On a nondescript block of 25th Avenue near Noriega, there’s a pale pink house typical of the Mediterranean-pastiche style of the neighborhood. But if you look closely you can still see where once the colorful pop art flowers were gloriously in-bloom for a few months between the fall of 2018 and this spring. The visitors who came to the house to be photographed in front of it are also gone.
Like the whimsical rooms in downtown San Francisco’s Museum of Ice Cream or the famous pink wall of the Los Angeles Paul Smith boutique, the Flower House mural — a covering of blackoutlined, multicolored flowers — was an optimistic and eye-catching installation that seemed tailormade for the age of the Instagram aesthetic. Like all good backdrops, the mural popped but didn’t pull focus from the person getting photographed. Flower House’s raison d’etre by tenant Patricia da Silva about “flower power” and “spreading positivity in negative times” was the kind of noncontroversial message that translated easily across photo-sharing apps and cultures. It wasn’t long ago that lifestyle and art micro-bloggers like Kendall Chase (@chasingkendall), Amelyn Beverly (@amebeverly), Amy Roiland (@afashionnerd) and others were trekking to the house, a few blocks off the N-Judah Muni line, for photos.
The Flower House was conceived by da Silva, 43, a Portuguese content analyzer and translator who lives in the lower-level of the house, and artist Madison Kichler, 23, a recent graduate of Academy of Art University. Even though the project was an almost perfectly crafted social media trap, both swore social-celebrity was a byproduct, not the intent, of the mural.
“I grew up in Brazil where the street art scene is very strong,” said da Silva. “It is revitalizing poor neighborhoods there in Sao Paulo. When the (American) political environment began to get so toxic with racism and xenophobia, I began to think about creating a mural with a S.F. flower power theme that would bring warm feelings when people discovered it.”
Da Silva found Kichler through Instagram and was taken with the artist’s digital renderings of houses with whimsical designs over them, including big, graphic flowers. Kichler, who had never executed a mural before, was inspired by pop artists Peter Max and Andy Warhol and was excited to take on the project.
With permission of the landlord and the hesitant blessing of the upstairs tenants, the two began the process of transforming the exterior into an art project. They started last fall, worked over the course of several weekends and finished in December. They estimated the cost at roughly $1,300 between materials and Kichler’s time.
Within weeks of completion, the Flower House began to attract people. Kichler started a corresponding Instagram account to document visitors who posted their photos. Some of the social media personalities who posted pictures in front of the house, tagging or hashtagging #sfflowerhouse have large social reaches, like San Francisco Instagramer
@mollified, an early discoverer of the house, who has almost 60,000 followers.
Although both were encouraged by the attention at first, da Silva soon became weary. Da Silva initially agreed to an interview with The Chronicle, then canceled, concerned about what attention beyond the house’s presence on social media might bring. The upstairs neighbors began complaining about people taking photos on the house’s stoop, she said, and were not ready for more publicity. Eventually, da Silva agreed to speak to The Chronicle at a cafe near Flower House.
Da Silva entered wearing an Adidas anorak covered in flowers.
“I wear something with flowers almost every day,” she said.
Kichler, who works for a creative agency not far from the Flower House, joined us and said the project was one of the things that helped her land the position after graduating in December. Around the neighborhood she had heard people compliment the house, she said, and she looked at the house’s social media presence as an opportunity for exposure for her art and continuing the Flower House project.
Then the bomb dropped: Da Silva had decided that the mural would be painted over the following month; the attention had become too great for her to live with, and she was constantly running interference with the upstairs neighbors.
But, Kichler said, with da Silva’s help Flower House would live on.
“Each spring, we’ll paint another house with flowers for a few months,” Kichler said. “We’ve already had interest from other people for their houses.”
That weekend, weeks before their announced end date, the Flower House was painted over. The announcement was made on Instagram, of course: “Thanks for all my next door neighbors who stopped by over the weekend to say they were sad to see the flowers go,” da Silva’s Instagram post read. “I’m sorry for everybody who came today with their moms to make a cute memory for Mother’s Day.”
In a follow-up message in the post, da Silva hinted that the project would indeed live on, writing to Kichler: “We like villains in the cartoons: ‘I’ll be baaack.”