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Greg Bayol’s favorite part of taking visitors around San Francisco City Hall is seeing the supervisors’ legislative chamber. The ceiling might look like carved wood, he says, but it’s painted plaster.

Today’s tour group — a man visiting from Dublin (in the East Bay, not Ireland), a young couple who just moved here from Seattle, and this reporter — admire the deception.

The wood paneling on the legislative chamber walls is real though, Bayol says. It’s Manchurian oak — softer and easier to carve than the oak species native to the state, shipped over from now-extinct forests in Asia. The curtains in the legislative chamber remain drawn at all times t

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