This is Maximum Luxury, a weekly column obsessing over San Francisco’s most expensive homes, because sometimes you’ve just got to scratch that itch.

Maximum Luxury was not necessarily designed to be a showcase of the city’s most absurdly decadent interiors, and yet that does keep coming up.

For example, this week we’re dipping back into 2698 Pacific Avenue, a house that could be called SF’s original hard luck luxury mansion, if there is such a thing.

We wrote about this property most recently when it was one of San Francisco’s most expensive unsold homes of 2021. That allowed us to recall a sliver of its very troubled history, stretching back to its dire condition and desperate need for renovation ten years ago, which led to a cascade of sales attempts, losses, and then finally the saving grace of the Decorator Showcase and a return to form.

Dramatic as that is, it skipped over the fine details of the current, eye-popping $25.8 million offer for this eight bed, eight bath, 10,000 square foot plum, such as: that woodwork, that wallpaper, those celings–dear gods, the ceilings.

It feels like we’re bringing down the property value just looking at this place. Speaking of which, what is the value of a home like this? The current asking price is a nearly $10 million hike from the last sale in 2017–but of course, this is really not the same home (or market…) it was then.

When a property blurs the line between private home and historical asset, it can be surreal for us mere mortals on the curb to consider putting a dollar amount on it.

Of course, so far, nobody with this kind of money has wanted to put dollars on this place either–it’s more than 240 days on the market.

But tomorrow is another day.

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