Marin Home / backstory
The entrance to the home
features a pink-flowering rose
vine. The rustic farmhouse
kitchen includes a utilitarian
hose perfect for washing dishes
or hosing off the dog.
Fran and Lisa strachan had been married only two years and were living in Fran’s Mill Valley home of 20 years when Lisa decided the couple needed to find a fresh new
place to start their lives together.
the very idea struck fear in Fran’s heart.
“My first thought was, ‘oh no, this house is
paid off,’ ” he says. “i managed to put it off for
about a year, but the idea wouldn’t go away.”
so this spring, the couple began hunting for a
new home with realtor kathleen clifford.
“ Working with Fran and Lisa was so enjoyable because they are genuinely nice folks,” she
confides. “they were introduced to each other
by a mutual friend a couple of years earlier, hit
it off and ended up getting married. Lisa’s new
to california and was really homesick.”
both Lisa and Fran are East coasters —
he’s from Massachusetts and she’s a recent
newcomer from Vermont — and still they
had different ideas about the kind of house
they wanted.
Fran, the retired founder of Zia natural
skincare and current head of business devel-
opment for Eo products, explains that he had
his vision of “living on top of a hill with a large
view and big deck, and Lisa had her vision of a
home like the ones you see in Vermont with a
big lawn and lots of property.”
With clifford’s help, they looked at about
50 homes, and Lisa, a nurse supervisor at
sutter Health in san Francisco, looked at
even more online. “We were struggling to
come together on a place and we went to so
many places,” Fran says. “nothing really
clicked for a long time.”
the expanded two-story 1890 Victorian
had been described in sales material as a new
England home in northern california, “which
just clicked for Lisa in a big way,” Fran says,
“and i liked it, too.”
With a parlor, living room, kitchen and
master suite on the main floor and three bed-
rooms upstairs, there’s enough space for his
t wo teenage boys and her middle daughter to
comfortably share the home with them.
