It’s easy to get used to amazing architecture when you live around it every day. For locals, the embellished, intricate rowhouses and old Victorians of San Francisco are part of the scenery. But the architecture in the city is one of a kind, and tourists marvel at the beauty and bright colors, trekking here from all over the world to check it out.
This beauty is not lost on 29-year-old Andrew Howell, who is focusing on a unique aspect of the city—its doors. So far Andrew has taken pictures of 55 unique and beautiful doors and put them on Instagram under an account called “Doors de SF.”
Andrew loves seeing a city at street level and getting to know it from the ground up. “A couple of years ago, I was living in Paris for a few months, and I spent a lot of time exploring the city and walking around. The doors there are insane—hhuge, ornate, historic, quirky. I then came across an Instagram account called ‘Doorways of Paris,’ which has since become a coffee-table book. I thought it would be cool to do it myself in San Francisco,” Andrew said.
So he took out his camera and started snapping away.
“My core inspiration comes from the more historical stuff; it’s pretty rare in the US to be surrounded by older and historic architecture,” he said. “So that’s where I’ve started. But I also think there’s an interesting part of the United States—the urban revival, the way we’ve been able to take previously industrial spaces and bring them back to life. There’s a lot of interesting things to capture there.”
Many of Andrew’s doors come from his neighborhood, Haight-Ashbury, or from Pac Heights. The doors he photographs are colorful and ornate, and look more like art than architecture. “Doors play such an interesting role in our cultural symbolism and our human psyche. If you look throughout literature and history, there are a lot of doors that symbolize transitions. There are so many expressions involving doors, like ‘lying at death’s door’ or ‘when one door closes, another opens.’ It’s more than architecture. I think as a subject matter doors are interesting because of what they mean to people,” Andrew explained.
Seeing these pictures reminds that the most oblivious among us could benefit from slowing down and enjoying the nooks and crannies of this city.
“There are a zillion pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge and the skyline on the Internet, but Google Street View is my favorite product because you can just drop into a place and feel what it’s really like,” he said. “Being able to show people what it feels like on the ground is an honest expression of what the city is and how people live. The goal is to share San Francisco with people from around the world.”
