Inverness By Design

Inverness is a coastal village on Tomales Bay about 40 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge. For more than a century, Inverness has been where many Berkeley families vacationed for the summer. Its residential architecture—rustic, simple wood-clad houses set in a hillside landscape—echoed Berkeley’s. These summer families shaped Inverness and its surroundings.

The story of how Berkeley families shaped Inverness and its surroundings runs counter to the prevailing narrative about California coastal living. Inverness avoids the California feeling of restless change. It remains purposefully underdeveloped at a time when stretches of California’s coastline are overdeveloped. Its houses generally present as a unified whole, not a bunch of expressions of conflicting individual tastes, as we often see today in California when affluence meets coastal landscapes. Inverness’s simple rustic cottages, and its siting along a calm, unspoiled bay, share more in common with Martha’s Vineyard on Cape Cod than with any Southern California beach community running from San Diego to Santa Barbara.

Inverness is a frosted window through which to glimpse Berkeley’s Arts and Crafts past. More generally, it provides a backwards view into what Lewis Mumford termed the “usable past.”

Courtney Linn works at a Sacramento-based credit union. His articles about Inverness have appeared in the Point Reyes Light and Under the Gables, a publication of the Jack Mason Museum of West Marin History. He lives part time in Inverness with his wife Sarah.