Living in Marin County: My Top Things To Do As A Local

This is Austin Klar, your lawyer turned real estate agent in San Francisco and Marin County. I've lived in SF for over a decade, but go to Marin County practically every single weekend. It's one of the most beautiful places in the entire Bay Area. It's got a growing, burgeoning food scene, great shopping, and incredible outdoor amenities and activities. I'm gonna share with you all of my favorite things to do, some of which I don't even know if locals know about. And if you have other suggestions, I'm always looking for more. Drop a comment below. Let's get right into it. Let's start with the food. Marin County doesn't have the food scene and food reputation that San Francisco does with the plethora of, you know, the street food and Michelin-starred restaurants and just the sheer amount of variety that San Francisco has in a densely populated area. But Marin's food scene is growing and it's becoming better seemingly every single week. So don't worry, there is no shortage of great food in Marin. And here are some of my favorite casual spots. First up is The Joinery in Sausalito. It's a waterfront restaurant and beer hall that serves my favorite fried chicken sandwich in all of Marin County.. But if that's not what you're in the mood for, they have great rotisserie chicken, salads, pulled pork tacos, ton of variety, really great spot, especially when the weather's nice. Next up is Pizza Hacker in Mill Valley. The beer garden and pizza joint is one of my favorite spots to eat outdoors in all of Marin. Huge open outdoor space, very easy to get to from San Francisco, uh, great for families, pets, super pet-friendly and kid-friendly. They have a ton of different pizzas and other food options to choose from. My personal favorite is the Ohio pizza with pepperoni and pepperoncinis. Another great one, and this is definitely a local favorite, is Soul food Puerto Rican restaurant. They have one in San Rafael, which is the original. They have another one in Mill Valley. Absolutely incredible food. Tortas, meat plates, sopas, and some of the best smashed plantains, fried plantains, that you're ever going to have. And one of my other favorite places to go is the RH Rooftop Restaurant in Cortemadera. Beautiful gallery space, ton of great furniture, but they have a restaurant on the rooftop with incredible views of Marin, Mount Tam, and the food is on point. One of the best burgers in all of the Bay Area. You can also get wine on the top floor and then roam the furniture gallery while you shop, or just hang out on the rooftop shop outside. And that brings me to other shopping destinations in Marin County. But before we get there, drop a comment about your favorite food spot in Marin. So now let's talk about shopping. Just like the food scene, the shopping scene in Marin County is growing. Same thing with the food— not comparable to, you know, what you get in San Francisco, but it is getting a lot better as time goes on in Marin. Uh, let's— so let's get right into some of the best places to shop. First are the two malls in Corte Madera, right across the street from each other, the Town Center and the Village. That's where the Restoration Hardware, you know, rooftop restaurant and gallery is that I was just talking about. There are also a ton other big-name department stores and furniture stores there. They're building an Art House there. There's a Crate Barrel there, big-name brands like Nordstrom and an Apple Store and things like that. So definitely a lot of variety at those places and a lot of great food options around there too. Next up is my favorite place to go shopping in Marin, and it's the Marin Country Mart in Larkspur. They have some really high-end home goods and interior design stores there, like Design Within Reach, Hudson Grace, Jenny Kane, Amber Interiors. They also have some great clothing stores there, like James Perse and RealReal. And they have incredible food. One of my favorite restaurants in Marin, Farm Shop, is there. Great pizza, great spot. They also host a weekly farmers market there. They just opened a Souvla there, which is a San Francisco staple that they just opened in Marin. So really great spot worth checking out if you want a place to shop at a bunch of different types of stores in Marin. And then on the opposite end of that, like a more quaint, charming shopping scene is downtown Mill Valley. There are some high-end home goods stores there like Summer House and Prevalent Projects. And there's also, you know, toy stores and, you know, baby clothing stores and food shops, wine shops. It is a very quaint setting, you know, surrounded by redwood trees, people biking everywhere. There are a lot of outdoor seating areas, people just hanging out. They do music there. So if you want a break from, you know, kind of the hustle and bustle of these, you know, larger, more like big name department store type shopping areas, downtown Mill Valley is an awesome place to go. There are so many other great restaurants and shopping areas in Marin County. And if you want to learn more about them, I'm going to be making a ton more videos about all the great things about Marin County, food, shopping, outdoor amenities, where the best places and not so great places are to live. If you like any of that stuff, make sure to subscribe to my channel for more videos just like this. All right, we've gone over food, we've gone over shopping. Let's get to what Marin County does best, and it's the outdoor amenities. Marin County has some of the best places for outdoor activities in all of California. The first one we have to mention, Mount Tamalpais and Mount Tam State Park. Mount Tam is 2,500 feet high and spans over 25,000 acres of land, 60 miles of hiking trails, which are connected to a broader 200 miles of hiking trails on surrounding public land. It's one of the most famous landmarks in all of Marin. You can pretty much see it from anywhere you are in the county. It is gorgeous. Another great one, and this might be the most famous, is the Muir Woods. This one is my personal favorite. It is a coastal redwood forest about 12 miles north of San Francisco. It's very close to the water, which means the weather is a little bit more Mediterranean, a little bit more foggy, so it makes it a little bit easier of an environment for like long-distance walking or jogging. They do require parking reservations, so you have to book a reservation if you plan to go there. You cannot just show up. Last one I want to mention is the Tennessee Valley Trail right off of Mill Valley. It's one of the best walking destinations in all of Marin. An absolutely beautiful nature walk along the Marin Headlands with incredible views. The trail spits you out onto a beautiful beach where you can, you know, have a picnic, you can swim if you're brave enough to get in those waters, or just lounge around. Another interesting thing developing in Marin County right now, taking a page out of places like The Battery in San Francisco, there's a members-only social club that's being proposed in downtown Mill Valley. The club will be called Treehouse Mill Valley. Memberships are going to start around $250. And based on, you know, current proposals, it's going to be open to anyone. It's not like you need to live in Marin or live in Mill Valley in order to get entry. It's just a $250 $50 a month membership fee. It's going to be located at a Mill Valley landmark, an old bank built in 1911. The historic exterior is supposed to be restored with beautiful windows that were covered up by the bank. There's supposed to be food and drinks on the first floor. The second floor is going to be like a meeting space, and there's supposed to be a rooftop garden as well. Personally, I'm looking forward to it, but a lot of people don't like the idea of members-only social clubs, so let me know what you think in the comments. Another great outdoor activity in Marin is boating. It's one of the best boating communities in all of California. There are so many different neighborhoods that are very ideally situated for boating, you know, places that that have like private boat docks off of homes, yacht clubs, or just entire communities that are just boating focused. First up is Paradise Cay in Tiburon. It's a 225-home community on the northeast end of Tiburon. It was built in the 1960s. It's actually one of the last landfill areas allowed on the San Francisco Bay. All the houses have private boat docks, some of them up to 60 feet, so they could fit huge boats. And it's also where the Tiburon Yacht Club is. Next up is the Belvedere Lagoon, which is west of Belvedere. It's a man-made lagoon from the 1950s, home to about 230 homes. Also the location of the San Francisco Yacht Club, which is the oldest yacht club on the West Coast. And just like Paradise Cay, homes there have their own private boat docks. And then you have the Sausalito Houseboat Community, which actually kind of got its birth in World War II. A lot of people lost their landlocked homes and used scraps from the shipbuilding process to build these floating homes in a community in Sausalito. So all of these great for boating, very boating focused. Now on top of all the great amenities, the food, the shopping, the hiking, the walking trails, the boating, Marin County is also just generally a beautiful place to live. There are so beautiful neighborhoods in many, many different cities throughout the entire county. It's hard to really go wrong in any area. I'm going to break down a few of my favorites, but I'm going to make another video that goes into all of these neighborhoods, ranking them in tiers in a lot more detail. So stay tuned for that and subscribe if you want to get alerted about that video. First up is San Rafael, which is one of my favorite cities in Marin. It's the oldest city in Marin. It's got beautiful architecture. It is the largest and oldest city with a beautiful historic downtown. There's museums, food, live music, film, arts. Um, it's very culturally focused. And value there is great. It's a lot more affordable than other Marin neighborhoods because it is located a little bit farther north. My 3 favorite neighborhoods in San Rafael, one is the Forbes District, a lot of historic Spanish-style homes. Then you've got the Dominican near Dominican University, which have some very, very grand Victorian homes, a lot of really old homes, beautiful area. And then you have Peacock Gap, which is a lot closer to the water. Now San Rafael is one of my favorites, but I think one of the most popular in all of Marin is Mill Valley, partly because it's located so close to San Francisco, partly because of that very charming downtown I talked about. It's really easy to get to. It feels very secluded, very private because it is built basically into hillsides, into forests. So you're surrounded by all these gorgeous trees. There really is no other place quite like Mill Valley in Marin County. It is very unique, very charming, very peaceful. Some of my favorite neighborhoods there, Sycamore Park, which is really close to downtown, Homestead Valley, also very close to downtown. And then you have Strawberry, which is probably the easiest to commute from or to San Francisco in Mill Valley. And Strawberry is the only one where you're really going to get meaningful water views. And then you have, you know, higher end waterfront communities like Belvedere and Tiburon. We talked about two subsets, the Lagoon and Paradise Cay, of those communities, but there are broader waterfront communities in Tiburon and Belvedere. Tiburon has great views and amazing outdoor amenities. There's also a very cute downtown with some pretty great food there. Michael Mina just opened a restaurant there pretty recently, and it's got incredible food and beautiful, beautiful views, especially at nighttime. My favorite streets to live in Tiburon are Villa Los Altos, Gil Martin Drive, and Paradise. Paradise in particular kind of follows along the water, so you're going to get some of the best water views, you know, almost at water level if you're living on Paradise. Whereas on Gil Martin and Villa Los Altos, you get stunning, you know, vista views. It's much more elevated, so you're getting much more expansive views, but you're a lot further from the water. And then similar to Tiburon, you have Belvedere, which is, you know, a small boating community that was established in the 1800s. The area of Belvedere is made up of two islands, Corinthian Island and Belvedere Island, with the Belvedere Lagoon right in the middle. If you live on either of these islands, your views are going to be probably the best in all of Marin. And a lot of those homes have direct water access and walking distance or a very short drive to downtown Tiburon. And then my hands-down favorite, like where I would live if I had an unlimited budget, is the town of Ross. Tiny town, only a couple thousand residents, only, you know, a couple square miles large, about 25 minutes north of San Francisco. It has some of the most beautiful and most peaceful real estate in all of Marin County. Very strict building restrictions in Ross, which means they don't allow you to build a lot of house on your lot. So you have a lot more land on your lot compared to other areas in Marin where you're allowed to build up to 50% or 30% of your lot. In Ross, you can only build on about 15% of your lot. The lot-to-house ratio in Ross is a lot different than the rest of Marin. All the homes are just so beautifully landscaped. The architecture is incredible. You do have some hyper-modern homes, but for the most part, it's historic homes that have been very carefully renovated with a lot of those details preserved. And it's super close to everything that I like to do in Marin. It's close to Larkspur and the Marin Country Mart. It's close to the malls in Cortemadera. It's close to like downtown San Rafael, very close to some of the best shopping and food in all of Marin, with, in my opinion, the best real estate in all of Marin, and it's ideally situated not too far north, easy to get to San Francisco. I think it's the perfect community. If you're thinking about moving to Marin County or just want to learn more, make sure to download my Marin County relocation guide. I'll link it in the description below. And as I said, if you want more videos like this about Marin County more broadly, things to do here, what real estate is like here, what the market is like here, uh, definitely subscribe to my channel. I'm going to make a ton of videos just like this. And before I go, I'm going to give you one last thing that I absolutely love to do, and it just so happens to be located in the town of Ross. It's having a picnic at the Marin Art and Garden Center. It is a beautiful landscaped garden space that was preserved specifically to prevent developers from building homes there. So it is an absolutely incredible place, very peaceful, very charming, definitely worth a visit and having a picnic outside, especially when the weather's nice. Now, if you made it to this point in the video, chances are you're thinking about relocating in either San Francisco or Marin County. I moved to the Bay Area over a decade ago to work as a lawyer at one of the biggest law firms in the world where I represented Fortune 500 companies and C-suite executives in state and federal courts across the country in multi-billion dollar cases. And now I represent buyers and sellers in one of the most important financial decisions of their lives, their home. If you're thinking of relocating and want more information about the market, please reach out to me. My contact info is in the description below. I will personally answer every call, email, or text, and I'd be happy to help you. And if you enjoyed this video about things to do in Marin County, you should check out another video I did where I, you know, gave all the reasons why people are choosing Marin County over San Francisco to find their forever home. I'll link that one at the top of the description below. Make sure to check it out, and I'll see you in the next video. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE]