Guest House History
The house at 273 Page Street was built for Richard Heney Jr. in the ten months after August 9, 1877 when he bought the vacant lot for $2453. Heney had arrived in San Francisco at the age of 16 with his large Irish family. Son of a mattress maker, he waited on tables on Montgomery Street at 18, worked for a fancy food importer, and along with his father in an uncle’s furniture store. He eventually became a partner.
At age 31, he moved into the house with his wife, Mary, two young sons, and his father-in-law. The family was blessed with three additional children in this house, and four more after Heney became a wine grower in Santa Clara County.
On August 4, 1883, the house was purchased for $11,000 by Joseph Grove Deming, the 54-year-old president of his family’s Capitol Flour Mills in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The Demings were an old Connecticut family. Joseph and Mary Deming moved here with their five young children, with a Chinese servant, and a boarder. “Severely honest” and of kindly demeanor, Deming enjoyed scholarly and musical pursuits shared with his family. One of his musical daughters became a nun and the other, a doctor’s wife. All three sons were active in the milling business. In 1901 Deming sold the mill and retired. He died in 1909, and his widow retained the house until 1915.
In 1978 the house was purchased by the San Francisco Zen Center, and dedicated to Edward Conze, a renowned western scholar and writer on Zen Buddhism. From 1978 to 1990, the house was a residence for special guests and senior students of the San Francisco Zen Center. It was during this time that the building was aptly named The Guest House. The cracks in the fireplaces happened in 1989 as a result of the earthquake in September of that year. None of them have been in operation since.
The Guest House became a residential hospice in 1990 to provide services for both the under-served without access to other hospice care and those seeking to live their final days with the support of a contemplative end-of-life care community. Hospice care continued uninterrupted for the next 14 years.
In 2004, due to the need to bring the Guest House into compliance with safety codes, the residential hospice services were temporarily suspended. In 2005, an anonymous donor gave the needed funds to purchase the Guest House from the San Francisco Zen Center. Renovation plans were finalized in 2006 with Stadler & Architects. After two years of fundraising for the extensive renovations (including an elevator and ramp access to the building), work began in 2008 and was completed in October 2009 under the guidance of Glenn Warner of Scott & Warner Contractors. The finished project is a beautiful combination of modern safety and accessibility and Victorian splendor.
The Guest House opened again to residential hospice care in September 2010 as a Residential Care Facility for the Chronically Ill with 6 beds, licensed by the State of California.