Cabinetry That Fits Fairfax’s Cottages and Canyon Homes

PineWood Cabinets is a design-build cabinetry shop for Fairfax homeowners who need a kitchen that makes the most of a small, irregular room in a house that was never meant to be lived in year-round. Cabinetry is designed, built, and finished in our Rocklin workshop in Placer County, and our crews travel to Fairfax to measure, deliver, and install it.

Fairfax sits at the top of the Ross Valley, where the flat ground runs out and the roads start to climb into the canyons. Much of its housing began in the 1920s as summer cottages for people escaping the city by rail, built small on small lots and never intended for winter. Over the decades those cottages were made year-round, added onto, raised, and added onto again, and the result is the most eclectic housing stock in Marin: no two houses alike, most of them modest, many of them charming, and almost none of them with a kitchen that was planned.

Downtown, along Broadway and Bolinas Road, the oldest cottages sit on the flat streets near the town center. From there the town climbs. Cascade Canyon runs up Cascade Drive under redwoods toward the open space preserve, with homes tucked onto lots that fall away from the road. Deer Park lies along Porteous Avenue toward the trailhead. Manor is the neighborhood on the hill west of downtown, with steep, winding streets, and Scenic Road steps up the slope above the center. Bolinas Road climbs toward the ridge with houses perched above it and below it. Oak Manor, on the east side toward San Anselmo, is the exception, a postwar neighborhood of more conventional ranch homes on flatter ground.

The common thread is the footprint. A Fairfax kitchen is usually tight, often an odd shape from a long-ago addition, and short on usable wall because the windows, the door to the deck, and the stair all landed where they landed. Designing for it means using the one good wall completely, going full height where there is no floor, choosing drawers over doors so the back of a base cabinet is reachable, and making every corner work. It is closer to boat joinery than to a suburban kitchen, and it is the kind of problem a custom shop exists to solve.

Permits come from the Town of Fairfax for every home inside the town limits. A cabinetry replacement that keeps plumbing and electrical in place is a light touch; a remodel that moves a sink, opens a wall, or brings an old porch into the kitchen is reviewed by the town. We tell you which of those your project is at the first meeting.

Then there is the shade. Fairfax’s canyons are among the darkest and dampest sites in the county, under redwood canopy that keeps a kitchen cool and the air humid from the first rain through late spring and sometimes all summer. Add the fact that many of these houses were built light, with little insulation, and you have a demanding environment for wood, one that shapes how we construct every cabinet that goes into a canyon house.

Stock cabinetry comes in three-inch increments and assumes square walls, a level floor, and a ceiling at eight feet. A Fairfax cottage offers none of those. The wall is ninety-one inches, not ninety-six; the floor drops an inch across the room; the ceiling steps where the 1950s addition met the 1920s original. Filling the gaps with trim wastes the storage a small kitchen cannot spare. Custom cabinetry is drawn to the real dimensions, so every inch stores something.

In practice that means a pantry cabinet that goes to the actual ceiling, a base run of drawers scribed to a floor that is not level, a corner that opens fully instead of hiding a lazy susan nobody uses, and construction that will not swell in the first winter under the redwoods. The same shop builds the window seat, the bookcase wall, and the entry bench to the same standard.

Fairfax is the top of our Ross Valley work. We also serve San Anselmo next door, Ross and Kentfield down the valley, and the full county is on our Marin County page.