Custom Cabinetry for Novato, Old Town to Bel Marin Keys

PineWood Cabinets is a design-build cabinetry shop for Novato homeowners who want a kitchen made for their specific house, whether that is a Spanish Revival officers’ home, a lagoon-front house, or a 1970s ranch. Cabinetry is designed, built, and finished in our Rocklin workshop in Placer County, and our crews travel to Novato to measure, deliver, and install it.

Novato is the largest city in Marin by area and the most varied in its housing. Old Town, along Grant Avenue, is the original downtown, and the streets around it carry the oldest homes in the city, modest houses from the early 1900s onward with small kitchens at the back. Spreading out from there are the postwar tracts that built most of the city: San Marin to the north, Ignacio to the south, Pleasant Valley and Indian Valley to the west, single-story ranch houses from the 1960s through the 1980s with kitchens that were walled off from the living room and want to be opened now.

Hamilton is the most interesting piece. It began as an Army airfield in the 1930s, became an Air Force base, closed, and was redeveloped into a neighborhood from the late 1990s onward. The result is two housing stocks side by side: the original officers’ homes, Spanish Revival with plaster, tile, and arched openings, now restored and privately owned, and the production homes built across the old base in the 2000s with open plans and builder-grade cabinets that are reaching the end of their life. The first asks for inset, period-appropriate cabinetry; the second asks for a better kitchen in the same footprint.

Bel Marin Keys, east of the freeway, is a waterfront community built on lagoons, with docks at the back of the lots and a kitchen that usually faces the water. Black Point climbs the hill above the Petaluma River in the northeast corner, with steep lots and homes that lean toward the view. Pacheco Valle runs up a wooded canyon in the south of the city, cooler and shadier than the rest of Novato, with the access questions a canyon brings.

Permits follow the city line. Homes inside the limits are permitted by the City of Novato, which covers nearly every neighborhood above. Part of Black Point sits outside the city and is permitted by Marin County instead. For a cabinetry replacement that leaves utilities where they are, this is a light touch either way; for a remodel that moves a sink or opens a wall, we tell you up front which agency you will be dealing with and what the scope triggers.

Novato is the warm end of Marin. It sits well north of the fog line that governs Mill Valley and Sausalito, with hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters. That is an easy climate for wood, and it shifts our attention to sun: which cabinet faces will take afternoon UV through a west-facing slider, and how a species and finish will age under it. Bel Marin Keys is the exception, where the air off the lagoons carries more moisture and we design accordingly.

Stock cabinetry assumes a rectangular room with square walls and utilities that can go anywhere. The Novato ranch house has a window over the sink that sits lower than any stock upper allows, a soffit from 1978, and a new opening to the living room that leaves an odd return. The Hamilton officers’ home has an arched doorway and plaster that moves. The Bel Marin Keys house has a wall of glass to the water that no run of uppers should block. Custom cabinetry is how you answer the house instead of filling gaps with trim.

In practice that means an island sized to the real clearances once the wall comes out, inset doors with the right profile in a 1930s house, and a glass-side run at Bel Marin Keys that looks finished from the dock. The same shop builds the mudroom bench, the home-office wall, and the media built-in to the same standard.

Novato is the north end of our Marin work. We also serve San Rafael just to the south, Petaluma across the county line in Sonoma, and the full county is on our Marin County page.