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A Japanese-Influenced Renovation in Tiburon

A Mission-Style Garden in Sonoma

A Creative California Home on Stinson Beach

A Japanese Inspired Modernist Hilltop House in Ross

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Landscape designer Davis Dalbok’s lush half-acre garden in Fairfax is in an atypically warm neighborhood he affectionately calls a banana belt. Its Thai and Balinese influences epitomize the central theme of the designer’s imminent monograph, which he says will be called “One Foot in the Tropics.” “I discovered my home accidentally during the dot-com boom when I could not afford even a tiny lot in San Francisco,” Dalbok recalls. “I began to look in Marin and the first time I peered through the old wooden gate to this property, I just knew it would be mine.” For more photos and the full story, click the link in our bio. 📸: @marionbrenner.

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Because there’s no better time to enjoy nature. Tree-house-maker Dustin Feider crafted this 320-square-foot dwelling within a magisterial oak amid 165 hilly acres outside Healdsburg, an hour north of Mill Valley. His futuristic spaceship-like assemblage includes a starshaped meditation deck made of Douglas fir, a sleeping loft with a floor of sustainably harvested chichipate wood from Argentina, a hammock made of netting and a diaphanous watertight 12-foot-diameter geodesic dome of high-density recyclable polyethylene “milk-carton” plastic, all of which seems to have sprung forth naturally. For more photos and the full story click the link in our bio.

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Dave McMullen, newly retired from a decades-long corporate law career, recently resolved to become an interior designer, but it wasn’t a quixotic decision. “I always tweaked the interiors of our homes in the past,” the intrepid 55-year-old says. “And then, after we hired interior designers Carolyn Einstein Dewar and Diane Einstein to reimagine our San Francisco home and explored design showrooms with them, I began to think of it seriously.” However, it wasn’t until McMullen and husband Edward Ortiz found an L-shaped 1940’s ranch house in St. Helena during one of their frequent jaunts to Napa, that McMullen made his debut. In one bedroom, a Timorous Beasties design depicting iguanas and pineapples is a moody backdrop for a leather headboard draped with a woman’s poncho from Oaxaca. For more photos and the full story click the link in our bio. 📸: @marikoreed.

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While some people come to Grand Cayman, the largest of the Cayman Islands, for endless white beaches and to snorkel among stingrays, turtles and starfish, Lauren Ebanks, an insider who has lived in this British Caribbean outpost for most of her life, recognizes her balmy tax-free haven as the capital of free-range chickens. The birds were set loose more than a dozen years ago by Hurricane Ivan, which leveled houses and backyard coops across the island. When the storm subsided, the AWOL poultry promptly multiplied. The rest of the story wasn’t as funny. Five months after the hurricane, the beautiful islands still didn’t have power and fewer than half the resorts bordering Grand Cayman’s famed Seven Mile Beach were functional. The storm damage was catastrophic, and without Ebanks’ employer, Dart Real Estate, leading the rebuilding charge, the island might still be recovering. For more photos and the full story, click the link in our bio.

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In our technological age, as brick-and-mortar businesses and institutions fade, buildings designed to house them also lose their purpose. But entrepreneurs and designers are finding ways to make them multifunctional and versatile. Several solutions in the Bay Area, while different from each other, share one thing: they promote a sense of community. In effect, they stand in for the village square — indoor/outdoor spaces that promote interaction and relief from screen-based isolation. Learn more about them in the link in our bio.

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Catherine Bailey is reminiscing about the first time she set foot inside the Heath Ceramics factory and showroom in Sausalito, 17 years ago. She and her husband, Robin Petravic, were exploring their new hometown and stumbled on the 1950s building, which she describes as a “time capsule” of sorts. “It had that feeling of: nobody had come in and injected any new life,” she says. “It didn’t seem like it was thriving at all, but it was very interesting and beautiful in a way.” Back then, Bailey was working as an industrial designer and Petravic as a product design engineer. They were looking to take their vocations jointly in an entrepreneurial direction. For more photos and the full story, click the link in our bio. 🖋: @anh_minh.

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Steve Oliver has made an art of solving problems. As the president of the award-winning Bay Area construction firm Oliver & Company, he’s spent countless hours figuring out how to build buildings, work with architects and finish projects on time and on budget. But when he encountered a work by the installation artist Edward Kienholz while visiting SFMOMA with his wife, Nancy, in the early 1970s, he was vexed. “It pissed me off,” says Oliver. “I thought, ‘This guy’s trying to tell me something and I’m not getting it.’” Oliver was so disturbed he left his office the following day and returned to the museum to puzzle it out. Surveying the piece again, he experienced “this great line you cross,” an intellectual engagement like nothing he’d known before. It ignited a passion for the arts that has consumed him and has had a profound impact on the Bay Area — and national — art scenes to this day. For more photos and the full story, click the link in our bio. 🖋: @laura.a.hilgers. 📸: @millennyem.

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Interior designers Jeff and Tray Schlarb mix shapes, colors and textures in their midcentury Sea Cliff home. For more photos and the full story, click the link in our bio. 📸: @aubriepick.

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When Mariam Naficy founded Minted.com, the online stationery retailer, in 2007, she “felt a little chicken” about testing her new business model. She was already a successful businesswoman. She’d received an MBA from Stanford and sold her first startup, the online cosmetics company Eve.com, for more than $100 million in cash. But she loved the idea she had for Minted: holding design competitions and letting customers decide which cards should be printed. “I thought crowdsourcing would be a way to tap into undiscovered artists who were hidden from the normal system and deserved a chance at distribution,” Naficy says. “It seemed like a way to bring constant freshness to the equation.” But she wasn’t sure anyone would go for it. For more photos and the full story, click the link in our bio. 🖋: @laura.a.hilgers. 📸: @millennyem.

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