The Albert Wilford Houses are significant for their architecture, a highly unusual variant among the thousands of Queen Anne houses in San Francisco. The ostrich-leather fascia bands and equilateral-arched domical bay roof have not been documented anywhere else, though they certainly fall within the range of typical Queen Anne treatments.

Their designer-builder-contractor-owner-developer was Albert Wilford, who probably made his own inventive mix of the architectural elements he found in the Newsom Brothers' Picturesque California Homes (No. 2, 1887) and in The California Architect and Building News.

Wilford, a small-scale developer, is little known, but among his few houses discovered so far, this pair on Vallejo Street are the most unusual and the most intact.

Extracted from the NRHP nomination approved in August of 1985.