Marin Home / BACKSTORY
up here to see this,’ ” she says, “I knew it was
the house for me.”
It was. “The house had character, which
was really important to Nicole, and it was
charming,” says Svenson. “And her cousins
lived two blocks away.”
After saying adios to L. A., Balin quickly
made the 1,100-square-foot home her own,
mixing the original windows and wide plank
oak floors with touches reflecting her per-
sonal creative design sense — one influenced
by her antique collector mother, L. A. fashion
designer friend Johnson Hartig, and her own
work in the music business.
In the living room, for example, she painted
one wall in a rich Benjamin Moore Van Deusen
Blue and installed an Eames chair she found on
the street in L. A. and reupholstered in a red-and-white ikat fabric, along with an antique
marble-top coffee table (a family heirloom)
and a West Elm sectional. Above the couch,
she grouped a mishmash of art, including t wo
cat portraits, jackalope antlers, and a dramatic
three-by-five-foot black and white painting
(painted in 15 minutes by Hartig) vaguely reminiscent of Robert Mother well.
Her music-industry roots reverberate
throughout. On the dining room wall Balin
hung a painting by Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda,
and in the home’s sole bathroom she used a red-and-white “Brooklyn Toile” wallpaper inspired
by the Beastie Boys’ Mike Diamond.
In fact, Balin enjoyed redoing her home so
much that she recently became public relations director for Coupar Communications, an
interior design business — confirming something she already knew about herself. “When
someone walks into my house, I want them to
know who I am, what I love,” she adds. “That’s
what a home should express.” m
DURING HER 15 years as a music publicist in L. A., Nicole Balin was always clear about her intention to return to San Francisco. She grew up there,
attended high school at Branson, and longed
to make it back to the city.
But when she started looking for a place a
few years ago, Balin found the city crowded
and expensive. So she switched her focus to
Marin, where her cousins had relocated. For
months, Balin commuted back and forth from
SoCal to NorCal, looking for a house for herself and her two dogs.
By the time she spotted this San Anselmo
home online, she was so done with travel that
she told her realtor, Nick Svenson, to make
a bid even though she hadn’t set foot in it.
Svenson said no. Balin drove up again. “I was
like, ‘ugghhh, I didn’t need to come all the way
