The registered historic district occupies the blocks bounded by Addison Avenue, Waverley Street, Kingsley Avenue, and Ramona Street, though residents consider the neighborhood larger, extending to Cowper Street, Embarcadero Road, and Emerson Street. The buildings most representative of Professorville are brown-shingled houses with gambrel roofs, their stylistic influences ranging from Colonial Revival to American Craftsman. Dutch Colonials dominate three blocks of Kingsley Avenue. One of the largest residences, a three-story, fourteen-room frame house at 450 Kingsley Avenue, belonged to Fernando Sanford, Stanford's first physics professor. Designed by architect Frank McMurray of Chicago, it features a Queen Anne corner tower and a Palladian window, fashionable details that signal the aspirations of a newly arrived faculty.

The houses in Professorville were not just architectural statements; they were the homes of people who built departments from scratch. At 1005 Bryant Street stood the home of Frank Angell, who founded Stanford's Psychology Department. At 433 Melville Avenue, Charles Henry Gilbert, founding chair of the Zoology Department, lived in a house designed by Arthur Bridgman Clark, himself an architect and Stanford art professor. The developer who originally platted the tract was eager to sell and offered lots in a variety of sizes, including full and half blocks. Over the decades, owners of the larger lots carved off pieces from the edges, selling peripheral parcels until the original houses sat on modestly sized remaining lots. The pattern created the irregular lot sizes and flag lots that give Professorville its distinctive, slightly eccentric character.

Not everything in Professorville is a century-old faculty home. The Dead Houses, named after the Grateful Dead rather than any morbid history, are a cooperative housing community centered in the neighborhood. Primarily inhabited by Stanford students and recent graduates, the houses carry on a tradition of communal living that dates back decades. Notable past tenants include Sean Parker, the entrepreneur and philanthropist who co-founded Napster and served as Facebook's founding president. The juxtaposition is pure Palo Alto: a registered historic district of Victorian-era professor houses hosting a student cooperative named after a psychedelic rock band, all within walking distance of the campus and downtown.

Professorville earned its place on the National Register of Historic Places as a district that reflects the founding of both Stanford University and Palo Alto itself. The city grew up around the university, and the neighborhood preserves the physical evidence of that relationship. Walking these streets today, you pass homes where the first generation of Stanford faculty raised families, argued about curriculum, and built the academic infrastructure of a university that would eventually spawn Silicon Valley. The houses themselves tell the story: ambitious architecture, modest by today's wealth standards, built by people who valued intellectual independence enough to decline a free lease and buy their own dirt.