ABOUT US
Our collection comes from the curio-cluttered homes of three generations of well-travelled and wildly creative women with links to San Francisco history.
The Eccentric Spinster Aunts
Alice (1883-1968) and Marion Burr (1887-1966)
Pictured below is The Burr House as listed in the California Registry of Historical Homes
The bulk of more expensive items in our collection are family treasures collected by the Burr sisters, Alice and Marion, whose family wealth enabled them to travel (and shop) the world as single women in their 30s and 40s, hence the nickname ‘the eccentric spinster aunts’.
According to records with the California Historical Society, Alice and Marion (also online as Marian), and their cousins, Lucy and Edith Allyne, travelled through Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. (Based on what has passed down to us, they were clearly more enamored of Asian arts and crafts than other cultures.)
We were only able to confirm through these records that they toured Africa and Asia in 1929-1930 and they did a round-the-world journey in 1934, taking our grandmother Winona with them on that trip. There are references to them driving by caravan from Cairo to Cape Town during the same period. Alice’s photography on file also includes undated images from India, the Panama Canal, and Hawaii.
Their family wealth came from their grandfather, a one-time mayor of San Francisco and very successful businessman, Ephraim W. Burr (1809-1894), and their father, also a successful businessman, Edmund Burr (1846-1927).
Ephraim was a whaling ship manager from Rhode Island whose crew abandoned him in San Francisco, the gold mines calling them. Rather than follow them, he saw opportunity in the city, initially opening a general store and then establishing the first the savings and loan business on the west coast. His success led to investments in real estate - at one time he owned a 20-block area in what is now the Union Street area of San Francisco - and mining among other ventures. In 1855, he gained attention in his fight against pollution, which led to his election as the 9th mayor of San Francisco (8th in some records as a predecessor served twice). During his time in office (1856-1859), he cut the city’s expenses in half and rationalized the civil service (turning the city’s treasury’s renumeration to fixed salaries instead of commissions). He later got involved in urban development, contributing funds for building of San Francisco’s famous cable car service and the redevelopment of Cow Hollow and Russian Hill.
His son Edmund, who had studied chemistry in Germany, inherited Ephraim’s business acumen, eventually taking over the Alameda Sugar Company and founding the Baden Company, a real estate partnership with his sisters.
Alice and Marion inherited the family home at 1772 Vallejo Street in the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco, which had been built by their grandfather for their parents upon their marriage in 1875. They lived in it their entire lives and it is today listed as The Burr House on the California Registry of Historical Homes.
In the garden, Alice had a photography and art studio, her work eventually recognized in an exhibition that travelled the US in the late 1990s and 2000s entitled ‘Alice Burr: A California Pictorialist Rediscovered’. In her later years she got into abstract painting and, when her eyesight started to fail her work with colors, she cut silhouettes. Her work is now held in collections with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the California Historical Society. She was a long-time member of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists and had exhibits at the De Young Museum and San Diego Museum of Art. In 1927 she also served as president of the California League of Women Voters.
Marion was also artistic, but her interests led her into metalwork with silver and jewelry design.
Sources:
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Burr
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephraim_Willard_Burr
California Historical Society / Finding aid to the Burr-Allyne family papers and photographs, 1839-2012 MS 717. Online Archive of California https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf5k4003zw/entire_text/
Oakland Tribune, September 14, 1969: Stately Old S. F. Mansion Symbolic of Historic Era
Good-By to a Great Lady by Millie Robbins which we believe was published in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1968.
Our Grandmother
Winona Wenzlick Sands (1907-2002)
Pictured somewhere in the world with her husband Maurice Sands who had a similar sense of whimsy.
Our grandmother Winona’s travels were sponsored by her wealthy ‘eccentric spinster aunts’, the Burr sisters. They kindly took her under wing as her mother had passed early in her life and her father - a Hastings Law and Harvard Medical School graduate - was a rather strict and busy gentleman.
We believe they first took her to ‘The Orient’ when she was 16 years old, but we have only been able to fact check a trip around the world they took her on in 1934, when she would have been 27. Things she picked up here and there, and items inherited from the Burrs, form a good part of our collection of curiosities.
Described as a ‘teacher, artist, and interior decorator’, Winona was a creative woman in many ways. As a student in UCLA she was invited to join the Faculty of Arts before graduation. As a wife, she moved to San Francisco (settling in a house on the same street as the Burr sisters) and founded Maurice Sands Interiors with her delightfully entertaining husband. Her eclectic style surely lent to the firm’s eventual designation as one of ‘The Big Five’ in residential design, their projects also including work for UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the Squaw Valley Olympics.
Winona’s eclectic taste led to the accumulation of wonderfully eccentric textiles and artwork. She inherited much from the Burr sisters in the late 1960s as well, and decorated her home with their mementos. We are hopeful we will find photos of her creative decorating skills in time which we will share here.
Winona was also an artist in her own right. Many of her sketches of people spotted on her travels are in the Allyne-Burr collection of the California Historical Society. She also created colorful fun posters and witty family holiday cards throughout her life.
For more information, see:
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/sfgate/name/maurice-sands-obituary?id=25506563
Our Mother
Nancy Sands Chandler (1938-2015)
Pictured below in Nepal in late 1967 with then husband Al Chandler and newborn daughter Nima Chandler
Our mother Nancy’s contributions to our collection include much of the Nepali antiques and folk art from the 1960s; some Indonesian textiles from the 1970s; Thai textiles, arts and crafts collected through the 1990s; and her own fun, colorful artwork.
Nancy’s travel bug, caught when she went to Europe in her 20s as a student group leader, led her to Nepal with her then-husband for a year and a half in her late 20s (during which time she had her first child); through India, Tanzania, Uganda, Thailand, Indonesia and Japan on the way home (baby in a basket); and eventually back to Thailand from 1969-1987 where she travelled locally, regionally, and internationally (while raising three daughters). She eventually returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to care for her parents, choosing the picturesque Mill Valley as her new home.
What those who knew her in the USA did not know is how famous she had been as an artist while in Thailand. After establishing Nancy Chandler Graphics in 1974, Nancy went on to become a household name to generations of expatriates and travelers for her colorful detailed maps and whimsical greeting cards. In the USA, she was involved in Special Arts for youth with special needs, won the Sausalito Art Festival t-shirt design contest one year, took on private logo and other design jobs, but never went after the fame she once had in Asia. Like her great great aunt Alice, she instead turned to dabbling in watercolors, etchings, and multiple different art techniques (driving crazy her daughter Nima who managed her business in Thailand through to 2019). Getting Nancy’s personal etching press out of her 100-year-old wood home perched high above the road in the mountains was quite a feat!
You can read more about her here: https://nancychandler.net/about-nancy-chandler.html
Nancy's Treasures
Nima, Siri and Kim Chandler
Pictured below at our mother's celebration of life in 2015, photograph courtesy of Nina Leva.
We may have inherited the travel bug from our family, but our homes are simple, our lives modest, and it is Thailand we call home, not the USA, where all the items in this collection are located.
People ask how we can give away the family heritage, but, trust us, we have each already taken several pieces that mean much to us. Nima has various Nepali and Indian treasures, Siri has the antique mandala that hung over our grandparent’s bed and the old globe, Kim all the photos and some artwork. There are larger items we’d love to keep but shipping them to Thailand is not a practical option. Instead, what we would love is to find these items new homes where they will be treasured and given life.
We named this site Nancy’s Treasures because, as we cleared out her home, many of the items here were found by surprise in the back of dressers and closets and in boxes that had not been opened in decades.
We must also acknowledge that if you were to ask Nancy when she was alive what she treasured most, it would not have been these ‘things’, but us, her daughters.
Scholarship
Cynthia Shaver
Cynthia informed much of our research into what things are and what they might be worth, spending two long days with us in 2016 informally going through carloads of voluminous bags of textiles and over packed boxes of antiques, as well as photos of things too large to transport. Read more about her at Cynthia Shaver Asian Art Appraiser.
Other Experts
Susan Stem, Tribal Trappings
A fan of Nancy's maps in Chiang Mai, Susan Stem provided invaluable details about our Indonesian, Thai and other Southeast Asian Textiles. She is also an expert in Asian antiques and how to incorporate them into your home decor. See Tribal Trappings for more, especially the home decorating page.
Annette Kuniganon
While we inherited much from our mother, the greatest gift was Annette. A long-time Chiang Mai resident who was very close to Nancy, Annette provided invaluable guidance from the first week after our mother passed. Instead of spending several days with our mother while visiting the USA, she spent several days with us in the attic sorting textiles. She has since provided the nudging needed to get things done and corrections where necessary in terms of identifying things.