Our canyon house is pretty big, but you don’t need a lot of space to create a corner oasis in the form of a reading nook. Every home has corners, and a corner is the perfect spot for a reading nook! One of my favorite corners in our canyon house is in my home office. […]
5 Modern Design Staples on a Budget
Iconic Furniture Pieces for Your Midcentury Modern Home Looking for great design, functional modern on a small budget? Here are five versatile modern furniture pieces that are easy on the wallet. All are under $500. Each one makes a strong statement in a modern home. Every one is selected for form and function. I own […]
Living with nature
When your house is on a canyon, you get used to living in close proximity with nature. Trees fall. Deer hang out in your driveway. Sometimes, nature is more violent than other times. A few years ago, two bucks got into a battle to the death in our driveway during mating season. One of the […]
In Search of the Perfect Leather Sofa
A sofa can make or break a room. It needs to be functional, comfortable, and good-looking. And while I know a lot of people with pristine white sofas, we were never a white-sofa kind of family. How does one wrestle, jump, or eat a hot fudge sundae on a white sofa? Not to mention the […]
Seven years and counting
That was seven years ago. In the time since, the home has, fortunately, appreciated as we hoped it would. After a difficult year, things began to level out. The man across the canyon who complained about our pool filter turned out to be the real noise offender, spends summer days sanding his deck with an […]
The Decision
After viewing the house, we drove the five minutes to the public elementary school. It was a beautiful campus, nestled into a hill, surrounded by trees. Our son played on the playground for a while, and then we wandered around campus, peering into the spacious classrooms. Then we stopped by our in-laws’ house just ten […]
Finding the Canyon House
One day, my husband talked me into looking at a house in a small town about halfway between San Francisco and Palo Alto. I wasn’t interested at all in the town, which had a reputation for, well, snootiness. But there happened to be a home there in our price range (well, almost in our price […]
Why we left San Francisco for the Peninsula
We purchased our canyon house in 2009. We’d been living for five years in San Francisco, in a wonderful little neighborhood in the outer avenues, just eight blocks from Ocean Beach. We had purchased our city house in 2004, when I was pregnant with our son. We loved the neighborhood, and it had served us […]
Progress Report
Here are a few things we have done so far to improve on an old masterpiece, in order: We had the entire interior painted, because the uniform brown of the walls (likely a Home Depot contractor’s special) was depressing. We had a concrete craftsman tear out the hideous faux marble fireplace surround, which had obviously […]
Living with (lots of) trees
I love trees. Trees are one of the reasons we bought this house in the first place. In fact, people who walk in the door for the first time have commented, more than once, “It’s like a treehouse,” because the main floor of the house is so far above the canyon and is set within […]