Custom Kitchens for Sea Cliff’s Oceanfront Houses

PineWood Cabinets designs, builds and installs custom kitchens and cabinetry for Sea Cliff homeowners remodeling the neighborhood’s 1910s and 1920s houses. Every cabinet is built and sealed 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 delivery and install.

Sea Cliff occupies a single bluff in the northwest corner of the city, with Lincoln Park and the Legion of Honor to the west, the Presidio and Baker Beach to the east, China Beach in the cove below and the Richmond District across Lake Street to the south. It was developed as a residence park in the 1910s and 1920s, which is why it looks so different from the grid around it: curving streets, setbacks, front gardens and large detached houses rather than flats shoulder to shoulder. Mediterranean and Spanish Colonial Revival stucco houses with tile roofs are the most common, with Tudor, Georgian and shingle houses mixed in, and the houses on Sea Cliff Avenue and Scenic Way sit at the edge of the drop with the Golden Gate in their windows.

The kitchens were built for households with staff. In a typical Sea Cliff house the kitchen, pantry, laundry and staff rooms form a service wing at one end of the plan, closed off from the dining room by a swing door and a butler’s pantry, often a few steps down and facing away from the view. Almost every project we see here is a version of the same brief: bring the kitchen into the life of the house, open it toward the garden or the water, and fit cabinetry with the scale and quality the rest of the rooms already have.

Sea Cliff has more garages and driveways than most of San Francisco, but the streets curve, the lots are steep at the back, and the house is often a flight above the street. We measure every stair, hall and door between the curb and the kitchen, build the cabinetry in modules sized to pass through them, and schedule delivery so the crew is there to carry and set it the same day.

The building permit for a Sea Cliff kitchen remodel comes from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection. Work that changes the exterior, including new or enlarged windows toward the water, decks and rear additions, or that affects a house 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.

Sea Cliff has the harshest climate of any San Francisco neighborhood we work in. The houses sit directly above the Pacific and the Golden Gate, so the air carries salt, the fog arrives earlier and stays longer than it does a mile inland, and the wind is persistent. Wood moves less in steady cool humidity than in our hot, dry home valley, but the finish has to cope with damp that never fully clears and with salt that attacks exposed steel. We build frame-and-panel doors so panels can float, favor stable species such as painted maple, white oak and walnut, seal every face, edge and back with catalyzed finishes in our Rocklin finishing facility, and specify hinges, slides and pulls in stainless steel, solid brass or bronze rather than plated steel. A shop finish also means no solvent fumes in a house that may stay closed against the wind for weeks at a time.

The light is grey more often than not, so the palette leans light. Painted finishes, glazed uppers and open shelving bounce what daylight there is around a kitchen that faces the fog, while stained oak or walnut is better kept to an island, a bar run or a scullery where it reads as furniture. On the bluff side, where the window wall is the point of the room, the cabinetry below it is kept low and simple so the view does the work.