According to local lore, this 1951 home in Sausalito, California, was first built as a summer cabin for a San Francisco resident. The city is only 25 minutes away, but it feels worlds apart from the hillside retreat, which opens up to far-reaching views of the San Francisco Bay. A stream trickles on the edge of the property, seals bark from the water below, and deer traipse through the surrounding trees.

“I was really taken by the home’s magical setting, and the way it felt like it was coming out of the earth,” says Julia Pellegrini, the founder and principal of the San Francisco studio 35th Collective. The architect and interior designer was contacted by the home’s current owners after they purchased the property in 2017. “We wanted to continue the heritage of the house,” says Pellegrini. “It was built with a certain modern ethos in mind, so we wanted to update and expand on that.”

Both clients and architect were passionate about preserving the home’s best features, like the wall of windows and sweeping wood-clad ceilings in the living room, as well as its down-to-earth cabin appeal. To that end, they only mildly tweaked the main floor, with Pellegrini specifying the addition of a front entry and powder room. (The existing home had no bathroom on the main floor.)

The team carefully preserved the kitchen, cork ceiling, built-in wood cabinetry, and stone fireplace composed of rock gathered from the Feather River.

Before: Entry

After: Entry

Before: Living Room and Entry

After: Living Room, Entry, and Powder Room

“There’s definitely a relationship to the site and hillside that feels very specific to this project,” says Pellegrini, who painstakingly matched the exterior cedar siding, reused cork ceiling tile on a new staircase, and brought in new materials that felt equally “natural, of the earth, and bespoke.”

On the middle floor, the primary bathroom is now dressed in dark gray marble on the floors, walls, and vanity, complemented by slim cedar slats that reference the home’s midcentury roots. A new exterior deck creates a place for the homeowners to retreat, and a reconfigured internal staircase connects the bottom floor, which was previously only accessed by an exterior stair.

Before: Staircase

After: Staircase

Before: Primary Bedroom

After: Primary Bedroom

Before: Primary Bathroom

After: Primary Bathroom

After: Second Bedroom

The lower level is now home to a guest suite, an office niche, and a dedicated laundry room. “We talked about doing the lower level in white gypsum board, but over time we felt like we could do better,” says Pellegrini. The team didn’t want the lower level to feel disconnected from the floors above, so they introduced light wood and covered the bathroom in white marble for a departure that doesn’t feel out of sync with the whole.

“We went back and forth, asking, ‘What do we think is the right thing to do here?’” says Pellegrini of the design process. “Cost is always a consideration, but so is wanting to do the right thing in the end.”

Before: Second-Floor Deck

After: Second-Floor Deck

Before: Bonus Room

After: Guest Suite

Before: Utility Room

After: Office

More Before & After stories:

A Complete Overhaul Lifts a Jumbled Hilltop Home to Cloud Nine

A Nature-Forward Napa Valley Home Kicks Off a New Era

A Choppy San Francisco Home Finds Its Flow After a Mullet Renovation

Project Credits:

Architecture: 35th Collective / @35th_collective

Builder: Xcede Construction

Structural Engineer: Design Everest

Interior Design: 35th Collective

Cabinetry: Rivers Woodworking