San José City Landmarks

This Queen Anne style residence, constructed in 1892 for John and Mary Yoell, exhibits such character-defining features as angled and box bay windows, an ornate front porch with ball-and-dowel spandrels and a pedimented portico, and textural variety including V-groove wood siding and fishscale shingles. Meticulously restored and maintained, the house is a distinctive example of the Queen Anne style of Victorian-era residential architecture in late nineteenth-century San José.

John Hampden Yoell (1863-1909) was a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer with an office in downtown San José and a graduate of Santa Clara College. He was the oldest of seven children of locally prominent attorney James Alexander Yoell and his second wife Emily. Yoell hired architect Theodore Lenzen to design a house for his new lot. Lenzen was an obvious choice, having designed most of the houses already on Schiele Avenue along with the Matilda Hill mansion that stood at the entrance of the Schiele Subdivision. Lenzen was probably the best-known architect in San José in the late 1800s, responsible not only for grand residences for the most prominent citizens of San José, but also for important city buildings including the 1889 City Hall and the nearby Fredericksburg Brewery and the 1891 Hester School.

–Excerpt from 2023 DPR form, Krista Van Laan, author