Epic seaside properties in SF and Marin, teetering on cliffs, with hefty price tags.

Have you ever driven roads up in Marin, with beautiful San Francisco views of the fog and the bridge and the sparkling water, and noticed some awesome looking homes right on the sketchy edge of the rocks?

The views are breathtaking, the water right there, like you could fall into it from the front entrance, and the house is glass, modern, and sleek.

The logistics of these homes built on cliff sides over the ocean, are baffling to conceive while getting an eye full driving past. The truth is however, they are of course designed and built to be entirely safe, balancing is a visual illusion. If they were in any way unreliable, they wouldn’t be priced at millions of dollars. Of course, like anything built by the seaside, structures that are subject to direct bayside moisture and weather conditions take a lot of upkeep to maintain that sparkle. But gosh darn, those Golden Gate views are arresting and people fall in love and fork out those big bucks to buy.

Tiburon has several notable, gorgeous mid-century houses, great style, so many windows, right there on the dang edge of the Bay. The water surrounds back decks, and rooms are built entirely out of glass to take full advantage of everything you can see from the sought after addresses.

Sausalito famously features a stunning number of houses with full paneled glass walls that allow its residents to look out on both Alcatraz and Angel islands. There are a number of weird, expensive and inconvenient things that come up when you have fully glass, windows instead of walls. But the extra expense and work you put into it is fully worth it to people with the resources to pull it off. Those views are one in a million. People travel across the world to see those exact views; you could have right outside your window every day. Hard to argue with that!

Let’s hit on the question every adult would have looked at a property that touches the ocean; what about like, storms and stuff? Big waves? Glass window walls? Yikes.

One of the common ways to build disaster resistant homes is called Insulated Concrete Forms, ICFs. Insulated Concrete Form construction can keep that sucker sturdy in very high winds, severe rain and flooding. Roofing can be built now with inflexible, interlocking polymer roof shingles, each held tight by screws. When building in any kind of high wind area, short overhangs are designed to eliminate the opportunity for lift. They use ultra strong roof fasteners to hold that bad boy in place.

The window walls are made of safety glass, which is designed to withstand the impact of a 9 pound piece of wood flying 34 miles an hour. So that’s pretty tough really. You can invest in steel shutters you could roll down over your safety glass if there were a storm. That’s a really reassuring level of protection.

A lot of these houses are built with back up battery systems. These things kick on automatically in the event the house we’re to lose power. It is set up to be a seamless transition, so the things in the fridge don’t even begin to see a temperature increase. Let’s be real, these are not the sort of homeowners who expect to be out there trying to start a generator in the rain. All this is worked into the plan, to make these homes the right fit for a certain kind of buyer.

These water adjacent homes are definitely designed with really good drainage, vents that easily allow water to flow back out underneath the house. I imagine you might lose some patio furniture if things get wild out there. It could certainly Jack up some landscaping, if you were to attempt pulling that off in the first place. You probably must let the cats inside on stormy nights

. The point is, the risks are heavily considered in the homes design and construction.

Outside of the simple demand for these locations impacting the price, the meticulous construction and very high-quality specific construction materials drive the cost of these homes sky high. Owning a cliff side house in Marin is not every person’s game, it’s for the few and far between that aren’t sweating the finances much anymore. Most of us can only imagine what it would be like.

But hey ya’ll, at least we don’t have that specific kind of insurance nightmare, am I right?

I mean, that’s the kind of “I can only imagine” we can be relieved to never experience in real life.

And if we’re lucky, we can have a couple evenings or sunrise mornings where we can look out from a hiking trail, or your windshield and appreciate that we live close enough to these views, we get to see them too. Even if we don’t own them.