According to this month’s issue of “Portfolio” magazine, Halsey Minor is planning to spend $15 million to renovate the Washington Street mansion he purchased last year for a reported $22 million.

On the market for two years before he bought it, Minor describes the Presidio Heights landmark as “kind of offensive and ugly” in its current condition.

Minor has hired designer Michael S. Smith (winner of Elle Magazine’s Designer of the Year Award in 2003) to renovate it.  Minor says it “Needs a lot of work to go from this grandiose monstrosity to a real house.”

The home is certainly in good hands with Michael Smith, who’s the subject of the new Rizzoli book, “Michael S. Smith: Houses.”  As we recently alluded to in reference to the late Michael Taylor, San Francisco desperately needs big projects like this to bring some pizazz into interior design.

There’s no telling how long the renovations will take, so in the meantime we’ll have to be content with the “Before” pictures (below). We do have an idea, though, that when this house is completed, it will be one of the truly superior private residences of the West Coast.

Photos via Byzantium Brokerage