3 Best Sights in Cow Hollow, San Francisco

This eight-sided home sits across the street from its original site on Gough Street; it's one of two remaining octagonal houses in the city (the other is on Russian Hill), and the only one open to the public. White quoins accent each of the eight corners of the pretty blue-gray exterior, and a colonial-style garden completes the picture. The house is full of antique American furniture, decorative arts (paintings, silver, rugs), and documents from the 18th and 19th centuries. Note that the home is only open on the second Sunday and second and fourth Thursday of each month, and is closed all January.

A light-green pastiche of colonial, Queen Anne, Moorish, and Hindu opulence, with turrets battling red-top onion domes and Victorian detailing everywhere, this 1905 structure is considered the first Hindu temple in the West. Vedanta, an underlying philosophy of Hinduism, maintains that all religions are paths to one goal. It's an interesting building to study from the street.

These identical white double-peak homes (joined in the middle) were erected in the late 1870s or early 1880s by dairy rancher James Cudworth as wedding gifts for his two daughters, down the street from his own house at 2040 Union Street. These days the buildings house a bar and a restaurant.