Since 1977, the annual San Francisco Decorator Showcase has benefitted San Francisco University High School's Financial Aid Program by raising more than $9 million in tuition assistance and allowing SFUHS to offer financial aid to nearly 24% of its students.

This year's showcase is at 2901 Broadway, on the corner of Baker.

The magnificent Italian Renaissance residence at 2901 Broadway was built in 1926-27 for San Francisco native Milton S. Ray, his wife, Rose Carolyn (Ezel), and their daughters. Ray purchased the parcel of land in 1925 from future President Herbert C. Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, who had owned the property since 1912. Ray chose as his architect Henry Clay Smith, known as “the hillside architect” for his skill of building on steep slopes. It is claimed that the construction of the house and its adjoining tennis court required cantilevering beams over chasms between several rocky outcroppings.

Smith, a native Californian trained in Philadelphia, had worked in California since 1900. Smith was the award-winning architect of more than 126 schools, libraries and other public buildings, many with his original partner, architect Louis S. Stone. Smith was much admired for his innovative design of apartment complexes in San Francisco, a charming example of which can be seen today in Pacific Heights at 2255-2263 Vallejo Street (1909). He also designed several other private homes in San Francisco, including the hillside mansion at 2700 Vallejo Street (1915), now the official residence of the Consul General of Japan.

Ray was an executive of the Ray Oil Burner Co., founded by his father in 1872 to manufacture stoves for the galleys of clipper ships. A permanent symbol to the Ray family is a metal plate cover from the Ray Oil Burner Company located on the driveway deck. The Ray Burner Company is still in business today in Richmond, California.

Ray was a member of the Cooper Ornithological Society from 1899. In 1904, Ray was put in charge of a government expedition to investigate bird life on the Farallon Islands. He later made important discoveries of bird, egg and nest specimens in the Sierra Nevada. Eventually owning 75,000 eggs and stuffed birds, many of which were rare and extinct specimens, Ray had made his first collecting trip as a teenager while on a business trip to Hawaii, China and Japan. He called his collection the Pacific Museum of Ornithology, which he housed in the “Curio Room” on the top floor of his home. He did not open his museum to the public, but visitors were often taken up to the museum by private elevator. The collection later found a home at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California in Berkeley.

Ray was also an accomplished poet who drew inspiration from the beauty of the natural world. In 1934 he published a two-volume collection of poems, The Farallones, The Painted World and Other Poems of California.

Ray and his family lived in the home until his unexpected death in 1946, upon which the house was sold to Mitchel L. Mitchell for $93,000. Ray had left instructions that his home be offered to the Mitchells because Mitchell had approached Ray about purchasing it several years earlier.

Mitchell, born in Fresno, California, had begun his career managing pharmacies and later prospered in San Francisco commercial real estate. He moved into the house with his wife, Emma Kenderdine Mitchell, and children Holbrook, 16, and Gladyne, 4. In the 1950’s, Mitchell remodeled one of the theaters, which had been installed by the Rays to cultivate the dramatic pursuits of their daughters, into a library for his wife’s extensive collection of books.

Holbrook and Gladyne grew up with a deep affection for history, music and the arts. After completing his education, Holbrook owned vineyard property in the Napa Valley. Gladyne studied at home and abroad, and like her father, entered the field of commercial real estate. Gladyne cared for her parents until they passed away in the 1980’s, and she lived in the family home until 2006.