Marin County Kitchen Permits

Marin is the jurisdiction in this guide where the first question — who is the building official for this address — does the most work. The County of Marin’s Community Development Agency is the permitting authority for the unincorporated county, which includes some of its most-remodeled streets: Kentfield and Greenbrae, Strawberry and Tamalpais Valley, Marin City, the coastal villages such as Stinson Beach, and the San Geronimo Valley. Everything inside a city or town limit belongs to that city or town: Mill Valley, Sausalito, Tiburon, Belvedere, Ross, Larkspur, Corte Madera, San Anselmo, Fairfax, San Rafael and Novato each run their own building division. A Kentfield address and a Larkspur address can be on the same road and answer to different counters.

The towns know this is confusing, and the clearest of them say so on the application page. Mill Valley’s permit instructions tell applicants, before anything else, to confirm the address is in the City of Mill Valley and not an unincorporated area, and link a map for the purpose. We follow the same rule during Discovery for every Marin address, because the answer determines which portal the plans go into, what the town requires of the applicant, and — as the sections below show — whether the town commits to a review time on its own page.

One honest limit of this page: the County’s own web pages could not be fetched by our tools at the time of writing — the county site returned an access-denied response to every request — so nothing here quotes the County on what it exempts, how it routes applications, or what it charges. The County row in the table says so. The rest of this page is built from what the towns publish, and the towns are where most Marin kitchens are.

San Rafael’s permit sheet is the clearest local statement of the four triggers, because it defines permit-required work to include altering or replacing any electrical, gas, mechanical or plumbing system; its permit menu then sorts a remodel under General Permit — new structures, remodels, additions, repairs, pools, decks — rather than under Minor Permit, which it reserves for work needing minor to no plan review such as reroofs, electrical service, water heaters and furnaces. A kitchen that relocates a sink, adds a circuit for an induction range, or opens a wall to the dining room is a General Permit in San Rafael’s vocabulary and a plan-review submittal in Mill Valley’s.

The fifth trigger is the town’s design review. Ross states on its building page that certain types of projects requiring a building permit — new residences, large landscaping projects, additions and the like — are typically reviewed by the Advisory Design Review Group and approved by the Town Council. A kitchen inside existing walls is not on that list, and we do not suggest it is; but a kitchen that grows into an addition, or changes a window or door on an elevation, can be, and in Ross that means a public body rather than a plan checker. Other Marin towns have their own versions of design review for exterior change, and Discovery is where we establish whether a given kitchen touches the envelope at all.

Electrical and plumbing permits sit with the licensed trades that do that work, under the general contractor who holds the building permit. Our scope is the cabinetry: we build it in Rocklin, we install it with our own crews, and we coordinate the shop drawings against the plan set the remodel is permitted under. Where a Marin kitchen keeps every fixture and circuit where it is, the question of a permit is the question in the previous section — and where it does not, the permit is the general contractor’s to pull and the inspection sequence sets our installation date.

During Discovery we confirm which Marin office governs the address, using the town’s own map where one is published, and we record whether the parcel sits in a design-review overlay, a flood zone, or a hillside area that San Rafael’s cautions describe. Conceptual Design decides whether fixtures move; that decision decides whether the kitchen is a cosmetic project or a plan-review one, and in Mill Valley it decides whether a four-to-six-week plan check sits in the calendar. Design Development and Final Specifications produce our shop drawings against the plan set the remodel is filed under, and nothing in fabrication waits on the town: cabinetry is built in Rocklin while the permit is in review, against dimensions frozen only once the approved drawings fix where walls and rough-ins will be.

Installation is where Marin’s geography matters. Our crews travel from Rocklin, and a Tiburon or Stinson Beach address sets a delivery route and a day; a town that closes on Fridays sets inspection days. We schedule installation against the inspection sequence rather than the finish date, and on a permitted remodel the electrical and plumbing finals belong to the trades that pulled those permits. On a cabinets-only project with nothing else touched, there is no inspection to wait for, and the only Marin question left is the one this page cannot answer for you: whether your town, asked directly, treats that project as cosmetic.