Letting the sunshine in

By Eva Hagberg Fisher

“Sometimes there’s a piece of me that thinks, ‘Oh that’s really what it was meant to be,’ ” says architect Heidi Richardson of the Mill Valley house she recently renovated for a family. She’s talking about the way the house nestles into a grove of redwoods, or, more specifically, the way the original structure seemed almost incomprehensibly dark and overgrown — something that couldn’t have been the original architect’s intent. And that’s because when it was built in 1954, the redwoods were a lot smaller, the creekside lot was more dappled than dank, and the neighborhood was far less occupied.

But when Kathleen Craven and Roark Van Dien bought this woodsy cabin in 2014, it was a mystery; only seven windows illuminated the entire 2,600-square-foot structure, which felt low- slung and dusty. “It was really dreary,” Richardson says. Craven agrees, adding, “It was so dark and dingy.” But both of them saw something magical in the house by architect Gus Costigan — and that’s what they worked diligently for seven months to uncover.

“I had a specific vision for our new home,” says Craven, who works in marketing for Yoga Journal. That meant a new master suite, bright bedrooms for the children (Olivia, 14, and Hunter, 12) and a wall of windows on the ground floor. Without curtains or shades on the windows, the eye is drawn toward the sun-speckled surroundings.

The drive to return the house to what it might have been also meant reusing every inch of original wood during the renovation. “The whole front porch is recycled from the exterior of the old