In this episode of The Trades Show, host Briana Ottoboni sits down with Bob Buckter, the San Francisco native known citywide as ”Dr. Color,” an architectural colorist whose palettes sit on more than 18,000 buildings in San Francisco and 25,000 across a 56-year career, inside his San Francisco home. Their conversation traces the whole arc — from the two weeks he worked for a painter in 1970 before going into business for himself, to the signs he staked on every finished Victorian that made the phone ring, to the year-long sailing trip around the world that ended with him quitting painting for good and doing only the part he loved. Bob walks through the formula underneath the color you see all over the city — a medium-value body, a moderate chroma, a light major trim, a darker shade at the base — and the subconscious architecture beneath it, the posts and beams and friezes he accents so a building reads as solid enough to walk into. He talks about popularizing gold leaf on San Francisco exteriors when nobody here had seen it, and the new book that took three and a half years to make, its cover a house he painted in 1976 from the colors he spotted in an architect's necktie. He's candid about the edges — the all-one-dark-color trend he calls an ignorant approach because it ignores the architecture, the difficulty of coming up with something genuinely new after 25,000 jobs, the fact that he's worked solo the entire time with no successor, though he says he's open to one — and he's easier about technology than you might expect, from the custom program he commissioned in 1990 that cut a job spec from forty-five minutes to seven, to the clients who try AI and then call him anyway. Whether you're a designer, a restorer, or someone who has walked past a building and wondered why it looked good, this episode is a masterclass in developing a signature style, building a reputation one sign at a time, and what good taste actually means from someone about to turn eighty.

The Trades Show is an interview series on location with modern artisans exploring what it means to be human: the ability to create with our hands.

🎨 Where to find Bob Buckter:Website: https://drcolor.com/Book: https://drcolorbook.com/

⚒️ Where to find The Trades Show:Instagram: @tradesshowTikTok: @tradesshowYouTube: @tradesshowSubstack: Trade SecretsWebsite: https://www.thetradesshowpod.com/

✨ Where to find your host, Briana:Instagram: @brianaaugustinaSubstack: https://brianaaugustina.substack.com/Website: https://www.brianaaugustina.com/

🎬 In this episode:00:00 This Is What San Francisco Looks Like00:53 Season Setup In SF01:26 Meet Bob Buckter02:43 What An Architectural Colorist Does04:09 Eighteen Thousand Buildings04:31 The Signs That Built A Reputation05:30 Costa Rica And The Rainforest Preserve09:08 From Painting To Color Consulting09:54 Quitting Painting, Sailing The World10:30 Inside The Process12:59 The New Book13:27 The Colors In An Architect's Necktie15:36 The Placement Formula16:43 The All-One-Color Trend17:44 Popularizing Gold Leaf19:56 Restoring Mercedes Convertibles21:42 What Good Taste Means23:09 Taste, AI, And What Machines Miss25:36 The Book, And Turning Eighty27:06 The Paint-By-Number Spec29:00 The Rose-Colored Glasses29:28 The Computer Program From 199033:01 What's Changed In 56 Years36:27 Post And Beam Psychology39:09 Where To Buy The Book39:36 The Lightning Round44:23 One Thing To Take Away