When designer and Bay Area native Lindsay Anyon Brier and her husband, Hank, decided it was time to transplant their family (including two young sons, Hawken and Whit) from an urban landscape to greener pastures—someplace still a convenient commute to Anyon Atelier, her San Francisco–based design business and store, and his law office—it didn’t take long for them to home in on Mill Valley. Just a fifteen-minute drive over the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County— a former hippie enclave more Eden than suburb—the village lay nestled between the towering redwoods of Muir Woods, the hiking trails of Mount Tamalpais, and the Pacific Ocean. Brier instantly fell for its artsy, small-town vibe.

The housing market, however, was tight. Acting on a hot tip that a property was about to hit the market, the couple rushed over for a sneak preview, only to find it surrounded by a high wooden fence. Undeterred, Brier had Hank lift her up to get a peek. While the house itself was nothing special, the garden was lovely: massive oaks and swaying palms, a giant fig tree, mature white camellias, incredible light. Brier could see her children growing up in that idyllic space. Here was her family’s own slice of Eden.

Though it would be a challenge, Brier knew the house had potential. A brown-shingled structure originally built in 1981, it had passed through many hands and undergone some ill-conceived alterations in the intervening years, resulting in a rabbit warren of small, gloomy rooms downstairs that made no coherent sense. “One of the hardest things about being a designer,” Brier explains, “is that I could envision ten different ways we could have gone with this house.” But for that garden, and her family, her way forward was clear. “I wanted a bright and breezy indoor-outdoor space, contemporary, art-filled,” she explains. She’d furnish it with favorite pieces, a mix of antique and modern, many bought for her store that she couldn’t bear to part with. Case in point: a rare, 1960s sculptural wicker settee by Isamu Kenmochi.

“I told my husband we’d be doing a small renovation, but,” she admits, “it was massive.” Also green: Solar panels on the roof. White stucco walls, seven inches thick, to capture the sun’s warmth during the day and release it during the cool of a Mill Valley night, a time-honored passive heating system. Another earth-friendly boost was the recycled denim insulation, a non-toxic and undoubtedly San Francisco-hippie-approved choice.

Mill Valley’s strict building codes make it difficult to enlarge a home, but Brier had correctly surmised that because the first floor was twice the size of the second, the upstairs could be bumped out to equal the lower floor’s square footage. Thus three bedrooms became four, with enough space left over to accommodate a laundry room, another bath and generous closets in the new primary suite. The maze of downstairs rooms, some sunken, some not, got leveled up and broken open to expand and unify the living room and kitchen and create a new, art-friendly hallway that runs from the front of the house to the back. There, she carved out a doorway and designed a three-paneled glass door framed in black, for a seasonally-changing triptych of the garden vista beyond. To further embrace nature and flood the home with more light, new windows went in throughout and ceilings got kicked up to the roof to accommodate skylights wherever possible. “I love standing at the kitchen sink,” Brier says, “and looking up at the skylight where the oak trees and the palms meet over the top.”

The greatest challenge of the three-year-long redo? Partway through the process, Hank suffered a near-fatal skiing accident and lay in a coma for weeks. “I had to put the renovation on hold for a while. I was stretched pretty thin,” Brier admits. But thankfully, her husband recovered. Life—and work—began anew. More than ever, she committed to creating “a happy space where our children would feel safe and comfortable.” It worked. The family settled in, grew, and welcomed another member to their ranks: daughter Yardley, now six years old.