From the outside it’s eye-catching, and as the only Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building in San Francisco, it’s unique and now the interior of 140 Maiden Lane is about to gain protected landmark status if the city’s Planning Department’s proposal gets approved.

140 Maiden Lane.

140 Maiden Lane. Image by Chris / CC BY-SA 2.0

The shop is one of many along SF’s most exclusive retail strip and authorities are seeking to protect the features created by Wright when he redesigned an old warehouse in 1948. The interior contains fittings that date from that remodelling, but the show stealer is the building’s spiral staircase, seen as a dummy run for the much more famous spiral walkway in Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York