Skeeter Jones is a craftsman, a carpenter, an artist, a low-tech man in high-tech San Francisco. He puts old faces on vintage houses — restoring or reimagining Victorian homes.

There was a time, he said, when people looked down on someone who worked with his hands. There was a time, too — in the 1970s and later — when homeowners looked down on San Francisco’s Victorian houses. Many of their classic elaborate fronts were considered old-fashioned, expensive to maintain and ugly. So hundreds of Victorian fronts were covered up with aluminum or asbestos siding or stucco.

“Painted ladies in concrete overcoats,” Jones calls them.

But Victorians came back into style, and now many homeowners want to restore the classic San Francisco look.

Jones started Clearheart Fine Design and Building in 1982, and he’s thrived ever since, restoring or rebuilding the old houses, giving them new Victorian facades so they look brand, spanking old.

His services are not inexpensive: Jones charges $100,000 to produce a concept drawing and do the work. The customer pays for the material and the paint, so a typical job can cost about $200,000 and take months.

“It’s hard work, but it’s fun,” Jones said.

‘10 on a scale of 10’

His clients love him. Nettie Atkisson, who decided to restore the facade of a Victorian in the North of the Panhandle neighborhood, called Jones after a months-long search for someone to do the project.

“He had more ideas in five minutes than my architect had in five months,” she said.

“He’s amazing,” said David Harnden, who had Jones redo his Stick-Eastlake Victorian, a style popular in the late 19th century in which decorative boards are overlaid on the exterior of the house, on Hill Street in Dolores Heights.

Jim Warshell, the president of San Francisco’s Victorian Alliance, also has high praise for Jones.

“I think the world of Skeeter,” said Warshell, whose organization seeks to preserve the city’s legacy of mid- to late-19th century houses. “He proves the crafts are still here. He’s a 10 on a scale of 10.”

Warshell is passionate on the subject of Victorians. “They are an endangered species,” he said. “And Noe Valley is ground zero for the problem.”

Integrity of construction

Noe Valley has a lot of small Victorians, but it is not an official historic district, which would offer some protection to the houses.

“So people buy an old cottage, rip it down and put up a big new mini-mansion,” he said. “People come to San Francisco to see the Victorians. They don’t come to see mini-mansions.”

Jones has admired Victorian houses for years. He thinks they are part of what makes San Francisco what it is. They were built mostly between 1870 and 1900, of redwood. “Clear wood, no knots. Heart redwood, from trees that were hundreds of years old when they were cut,” Jones said.

Thus Clearheart, the name of his firm.

He also admires the craftsmanship that went into the houses. “The people who built them had an integrity of what they did,” he said.

Jones works from old pattern books for the basics and adds his own ideas.

Some of the old houses he works on have been neglected or not maintained properly. “You know the joke: They are held together by termites holding hands.” he said.

Once he gets a project, Jones photographs the standing house, and looks for the shadow — the scars — of the original construction underneath.

On occasion, he goes beyond simple reconstruction. “I build of the period,” he said. “I embellish what was there. I draw upon the past.”

Jones tries to make the past live for the modern lifestyle. He calls what he does “carpenter gothic” sometimes, as if he were a Victorian-era designer working out new ideas. The Victorians, he said, mixed up styles, made something new.

He shows one example on 19th Street, in the Castro. He redid a house, taking off the old front and making a new one. It was Victorian and then some, with added touches like extra finials, which are decorative devices atop round pieces. And he added pendants, cornices and other pieces of wooden gingerbread.

Taking Victorianism to limit

A small girl who lived in the house said she liked dragons, so Jones built the heads of four dragons into the front bracing. The owner painted the house purple and gold. The Victorian Alliance calls this place “a Victorian fantasy.” The organization’s members liked it so much they put it on their annual house tour.

A lot of Jones’ work is like that. “I take Victorianism as far as I can imagine,” he said.

He is not particular about what the house interior looks like. These are modern times, after all, and living in a gloomy, drafty old house may not always work for the 21st century.

But the exterior, that’s a “gift to the street,” as one book about Victorians was called.

Seizing the opportunity

Jones is a burly man, in his 60s, with a handlebar mustache and a head of unruly hair, like an 1890s roustabout. He was named Skeeter after a comic strip. His real first name “is none of your concern,” he said. He went to Penn State and studied art but was caught up in the on-the-road period of many young men of the time.

He came through San Francisco, returned East, and came back to San Francisco, this time for good. He worked as a carpenter and saw the chance to open his own business doing Victorian facades.

Today, Jones is concerned about the direction of San Francisco.

“There’s so much money here now,” he said.

But it’s a dilemma. A new facade on an old house is an expensive luxury. It makes the house more valuable, which drives up housing prices.

Jones’ said his two sons, for example, are among the many who can’t afford to live in San Francisco.

Carl Nolte is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com Twitter: carlnoltesf