OA House

“Everyone who goes inside this house either comes out cracked up or doesn’t come out at all!” This is the house at the center of Part II of The OA sci-fi mystery series. It's real-life story is almost as convoluted.

The house was designed by Houghton Sawyer in 1905 for the mining promoter Robert G. Hanford. Mining was not his only interest - his consolidation and sale of three large San Francisco railways was called the biggest cash deal in the history of the nation at the time. Hanford's second wife and "grand passion", Gabrielle Guittard Cavalsky, was the daughter of the founder of Guittard Chocolates. The grand balcony was intended as a place for her to sing accompanied by musicians below, but the marriage was short-lived.

The next owners were the Verdier family who owned the magnificent City Of Paris luxury goods store (a last remnant of it is the Neiman Marcus dome in Union Square). They, however, rented the house out and it became an opium den in the 1920s.
In the 1930s it was divided into two sections, a Russian Tea Room on the left and a brothel run by Sallie Stanford, later mayor of Sausalito, on the right.
It was an officers club during WWII, which JFK visited 17 times.
In the 1950s Mr. Verdier installed his mistress in the house. She installed her lover on the upper floor. Mr. Verdier moved in on the first floor to keep his eye on things, which prompted his wife to return from Paris and demand that the house be sold.
Subsequent owners included the unfortunate real estate nabob Catherine Doliani and Nobel winner Myron Scholes.