Wet and wild
Loonen, Flour + Water, Spruce, Stinson Beach, the Lodge at Marconi, Bay Area pools & plunges, MORE
REAL ESTATE • On the Market
Three Stinson Beach homes that came to market in the last 30 days.
→ 215 Belvedere Ave (Stinson Beach, above) • 3BR/2.1BA • 1910 SF • Ask: $2.850M • 1939 build along sea-facing ridgeline • Days on market: 17 • Agent: Cristina diGrazia, Golden Gate Sotheby’s.
→ 20 Lincoln Ave (Stinson Beach) • 3BR/2.1BA • 2273 SF • Ask: $3.495M • 1948 build on double lot • Days on market: 29 • Agent: Sherfey Group, Golden Gate Sotheby’s.
→ 131 Dipsea Rd (Stinson Beach) • 3BR/3BA • 1958 SF • Ask: $5.795M • lagoon-side 1975 build w/ newly built deck • Days on market: 6 • Agent: Kathleen Beaver, Coldwell Banker.
WORK • Friday Routine
Glass half full
CLARA SIEG • co-founder & CEO • Loonen
Neighborhood you work & live in: Oakland
It’s Friday morning. What’s the scene at your workplace?
I’m the co-founder and CEO of Loonen, a water company born from my IVF journey, when I learned how pervasive plastics and endocrine disruptors are and started trying to avoid them. I made simple, foundational swaps around our home, but couldn’t find a bottled water brand I trusted for my family. So we started Loonen: spring-sourced, filtered for purity, balanced minerality, and only ever bottled in glass.
That family foundation shapes how I work. I live in Oakland with a distributed team that is mostly East Coast-based, so my days start early. I’m up at 5a when my husband leaves for the office, which gives me about 2.5 hours before my daughter wakes. It’s a quiet window: it gets me ahead, and it’s a little alone time, which I love and miss these days.
Sometimes an early call gets interrupted by Fiona, my now two-year-old, popping into Zoom. That’s normal here, and it’s our culture. I don’t think work-life balance really exists. Between email, Slack, Zoom, social, texts, there’s no compartmentalizing the two worlds, so we focus on integration instead. Everyone knows my daughter, and if childcare runs late, she’s bopping around with me. That’s okay. It adds humanity and keeps us grounded that there’s something bigger we’re all working for.
What’s on the agenda for today?
We just launched with Sprouts, our first major retailer! It’s a huge milestone, a real chance to get Loonen out there, and a little overwhelming because it’s where we shop, and I’m obsessed with their assortment and I want us to show up perfectly.
From day one we’ve focused on doing things in a very human way. The water category is mostly public-company or PE-owned. That’s not us. We’re a small, mom-founded company trying to do it the right way, even when that’s harder. So we go store to store, supporting teams on the floor and doing demos. I love it, but nearly 500 stores is a lot of legwork. Right now it’s balancing time in market with behind-the-desk work to keep things running smoothly.
Any restaurant plans today, tonight, this weekend?
Tonight I’m heading to Flour + Water, a foundational, Mecca-level spot. Their margherita pizza is a true litmus test. No fancy toppings to hide behind, just everything executed perfectly. They’re also geniuses at pasta so I always order what’s rotating on the menu, because it’s peak seasonal and creative and grounded in excellent technique.
Other spots I love:
Mister Jiu’s: the Peking duck.
Spruce: San Francisco is a very casual town, so I love that Spruce exists as a reason to dress up for a more elevated vibe. We eat at the bar, which has a more casual menu but the same chicness as the rest of the restaurant, and the best dirty martini in town.
Causwells: a more casual neighborhood spot in the Marina with truly the best burger maybe in America, but definitely in the Bay Area. It’s a double-patty smash burger and it’s transcendent. The special sauce blends with the cheese, there are super thin fried onion strings, and somehow it’s not a greasy gut bomb.
Motoring Coffee: It’s a cafe and a car club, so when you go in there are rotating vintage cars parked inside. I’m usually a hot-milk-with-a-tablespoon-of-coffee kind of gal, but their coffee is so good that I get an Americano.
Luke’s Local: yes, it’s a grocery store, lol. But I often call it my favorite restaurant in SF. They have such good, healthy-ish prepared food, and their sandwich menu is unmatched. Order the trippy turkey.
How about a little leisure or culture?
My favorite thing to do on the weekend is go to Tilden Park in Berkeley and hike, then hit up the steam train. It’s truly a treasure of the Bay Area, an actual, little steam train that rides through nature, and everyone who works there is a volunteer and train enthusiast. My husband likes it as much as my two-year-old, which is either an endorsement of the train or a revelation about my husband. After that we’ll go to Saul’s for brunch, a Bay Area institution where the owner, Sam, keeps the menu grounded in Jewish deli tradition. Our usual order is pastrami sandwich, watermelon salad, and corned beef hash.
Any weekend getaways?
Inverness! It’s a little over an hour door-to-door from where we live and feels like a total escape. Barely any cell service, no real commercial area, and a lot of the quirkiness of northern Vermont (where I spent a lot of time growing up, and where we still go when we can manage getting away for a longer stretch). Great hiking, swimming, and any form of paddling or sailing.
Elk Reserve: at the very end, you can walk literally out to the tip of Inverness. If you go during a bloom it’s even more dramatic, but no matter when you go, you’ll see some majestic elk.
The Marshall Store: across the bay, you can either boat or drive around and get amazing oysters. Don’t skip the soft serve.
The Meadery: I can’t really pretend to be an expert on mead, but it’s very good mead and relaxed and beautiful and a great way to spend an afternoon after hiking and paddling.
What was your last great vacation?
We went to Miami over the holidays and through New Year’s, with our daughter and my parents. When I was younger, I thought of Miami as a full party town, but now I’ve discovered farther north and just a quieter, more grounded, restorative side to the city. Mandolin Aegean in the design district is a gem. The food isn’t fussy, just very well done and fresh. It feels like European summer there with a lot of multigenerational families dining together and old to young, which makes a place feel like it has a soul.
What store or service do you always recommend?
As for service, if Etsy counts, I bought a fish rug on there for our family room that is very busy and huge and (you guessed it!) covered in fish. But it’s reflective of our life which is chaotic and busy and doesn’t seem like it should work, but somehow fits together.
As for a store, Graffeo! It’s this very old-school San Francisco coffee roaster and, as their tagline proclaims, simply the best coffee. They’re so quirky: a massive storefront in the heart of the city but no cafe. You can only buy the beans, you can’t actually get a cup of coffee there. Since I mostly work from home, I make my coffee at home, and it’s this little nod to where we live. They slow-roast the beans at a lower temperature for a smoother cup and while I’m definitely not a barista, I love learning the technique and the process behind simple things done really well. We’re similarly maniacal about that at Loonen.
GETAWAYS • Point Reyes
Tomales treat
The Lodge at Marconi sits on 63 acres of state park land above Tomales Bay, about an hour north of San Francisco, right off Highway 1. The setting is Marin County at its most concentrated: the freshest oysters and kayak launches within a short drive, and the national seashore just across the bay.
GOODS & SERVICES • FOUND Beauty
Makeup game
Ciele is an SPF makeup line that actually performs like makeup — no separate sunscreen step, no chalkiness, no white cast, no grease. LA-based makeup artist Nikki DeRoest and beauty industry veteran Cerre Francis launched Ciele in 2023 around the premise of making cosmetics that take sun protection as seriously as skincare. Every product in the line is formulated with broad-spectrum SPF and clean ingredients.
The standout is the Tint & Protect SPF 50+, a skin tint that evens out your complexion without looking like you’re wearing makeup. As someone with sensitive, acne-prone skin who already layers SPF under my makeup, finding a product that seamlessly folds both steps into one without any tradeoff was the kind of thing I immediately needed to tell everyone about. It’s the only complexion product I plan to wear all summer. The blush is worth noting, too, for its SPF in a product that almost never has it. –Loren O’Neill
→ SHOP: Tint & PROTECT SPF 50+ (Ciele Cosmetics) • $44 per.
→ SHOP: Blush & PROTECT SPF 50+ (Ciele Cosmetics) • $34 per.
GOODS & SERVICES • The Nines
Pools & plunges
Aquatic Park Cove (San Francisco), protected open water swimming year-round for the hardy, with day passes or memberships to Dolphin Club or South End Rowing Club for lockers, showers, saunas, community