A Canyon, Held Privately.

The cottage at 75 Lee Street was built in 1973, a thousand square feet under a low pitched roof, with one bedroom, one bath, and an unfinished basement that holds the bones of the house. It is small. It is honest. It works as it is, and it works as a starting point for something else.

What sets the address apart is everything outside the walls. The parcel is more than two and a tenth acres, an exceedingly rare footprint for Mill Valley's Blithedale Canyon, where neighbors typically share property lines a few yards from the front door. Here the trees absorb the sound of the city. Deer pass on their own schedule. The light filters through redwood and bay laurel for most of the year.

The path from downtown Mill Valley to the front gate takes nine minutes. The path from the front gate to the back of the property takes considerably longer.

For a buyer, the question is what shape the land should take next. The existing footprint can be lived in immediately, refined gently, or kept as a guest cottage while a primary residence is sited deeper on the lot. The geometry of two acres in Blithedale Canyon is rare enough to be worth a long conversation about.

Mill Valley sits at the southern foot of Mt. Tamalpais, fifteen miles north of the Golden Gate. The town is centered on Throckmorton Avenue, where the bookstore, the old fire station turned coffeeroom, and the Sweetwater Music Hall arrange themselves on a single block.

Blithedale Canyon runs east into the town from Mt. Tam, a quiet residential corridor under a redwood canopy. The trailheads of Tamalpais begin minutes from the door, and the ferry to San Francisco leaves from Sausalito ten minutes south.