Custom Cabinetry for Presidio Heights Homes

PineWood Cabinets designs, builds and installs custom kitchens and cabinetry for Presidio Heights homeowners remodeling pre-1920 houses and Edwardian flats. Every cabinet is built and finished in our Rocklin, Placer County workshop and delivered shop-finished, and our own crew makes the roughly two-hour drive to San Francisco to measure, plan the logistics and install.

Presidio Heights is a small neighborhood with an unusually consistent building stock. It runs from Presidio Avenue on the east, where it blends into Pacific Heights, to Arguello Boulevard on the west, and from the Presidio wall down to the shops and flats along Sacramento Street. Most of it went up in the years after the 1906 earthquake, when the blocks along Jackson, Washington and Clay Streets filled with large single-family houses in Georgian, Tudor, Mediterranean and shingle styles, and Presidio Terrace was laid out as a gated oval of grand homes off Arguello. Along Sacramento and California Streets and on the downhill blocks toward Laurel Heights the pattern shifts to Edwardian flats, two and three units stacked behind bay windows, each with its own long hallway and rear kitchen.

That era explains the kitchens. The houses were built for households with staff, so the kitchen sits at the back, often a step down, behind a butler’s pantry and a swing door, with a service stair alongside. The flats repeat the idea at a smaller scale, with the kitchen at the end of the hall and a breakfast room or back porch beyond it. A century later, almost every Presidio Heights project we see is some version of the same request: open the rear of the house into a single room for cooking, eating and family life, keep what is worth keeping, and fit cabinetry that looks as if it belongs in a house of this quality.

The other constant is the street. Presidio Heights blocks are narrow, parking is scarce, and many houses have no driveway or only a single garage under the main floor, so we build in modules sized to the stair and doorways we measured, finish every piece in our Rocklin facility, and schedule delivery so the crew is there to carry and set it the same day.

The building permit for a Presidio Heights kitchen remodel comes from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection. Work that changes the exterior, including new or enlarged rear windows and additions, or that affects a building the city considers a historic resource, can also go through Planning Department review; interior cabinetry and finish work within the existing footprint generally does not. Moving walls, gas or plumbing moves the project into a fuller permit. We identify which path a design falls into before the drawings are finished.

The climate here is the opposite of our home valley. Presidio Heights sits in the fog belt beside the Presidio, with cool marine air much of the year, little direct sun on most kitchens and steady humidity rather than the hot, dry swings of the Sacramento Valley. Wood moves less in those conditions, but finishes have to cope with damp and with rooms that may never fully dry out between summer fog and winter rain. We build frame-and-panel doors so panels can still float, favor stable species like painted maple, white oak and walnut, and apply catalyzed finishes in our Rocklin finishing facility so every face arrives sealed. A shop finish also means no solvent fumes in a closed-up house during a cool, windows-shut San Francisco summer.

The low light shapes the palette too. North-facing and garden-facing kitchens behind tall neighbors benefit from lighter painted finishes, glazed uppers and open shelving that bounce what daylight there is, with darker stained oak or walnut saved for an island or a bar run where it reads as furniture rather than closing the room in.