A Glimpse Inside a Charming Healdsburg Home

Morgania Moore and her husband, Brook Bannister, both have deep family ties to the rural Alexander Valley outside Healdsburg. As a child, Moore spent many weeks visiting the home her grandmother built in the Soda Rock area near the Russian River. Bannister’s father had a place nearby, and Bannister grew up fishing and swimming in that same stretch of river, though the couple didn’t meet until they were in their 20s.

Now raising their 11-year-old son, Monroe, in the home that Moore inherited from her grandmother, the creative family is deeply connected to the land and to the handcrafted spaces they’ve brought to life together.

“This house, as the crow flies, is very close to the house my dad built in 1978,” says Bannister. “It was on the edge of these huge expanses of cattle range and maybe a few vineyards. There weren’t any other people around, and you could go out and walk forever and feel like you were out in nature. So this is really close to that; it has the same kind of feel.”

The low-slung, stick-built 1970s cottage and adjacent shared studio unfold in a series of imaginative rooms that bear the mark of a family captivated by craft. Bannister, a winemaker, musician and woodworker, has built much of the home’s furniture, from tables and shelves to kitchen cabinets. Moore, whose creativity extends from lighting and floral design to jewelry and textiles, has filled the rooms with large-scale foraged finds from nature. And Monroe, who attends a nature school near Forestville, plays music with his dad and oversees a massive Lego operation.

There’s space enough for the family to be creative, each quietly absorbed in solitary pursuits in different parts of the home during the day. As the afternoon wanes in the early darkness of winter, they circle back to the kitchen to talk, read and make dinner together.

“We’re all so individually into whatever we’re into. So we try to give each other a lot of room and patience to work on projects,” says Bannister.

“One of the things about having creative impulses is you dig the hole, and then you find your way out,” he says. “That’s how interesting things get made — but it’s also a more difficult process at times.”

Moore and Bannister wander into art projects the way others might pick up a book, following ideas as they come. They’re drawn to the possibility in the curve of a piece of bone, the palette of river stones, the shape of a piece of recycled metal. Bannister translates these inspirations into furniture or music, while Moore sculpts overscale pendant lights in papier-mâché, braids fabric into textured cushions and twists reclaimed fireplace screens into large-scale installations. Entire tree limbs brought inside arch over seating areas, and finds from Moore’s years spent on film sets populate the scene. It’s not just a cabinet of wonders, but an entire home of artistic imagination and creativity.

They both want to honor the house’s humble, artsy history and stay true to its bohemian, 1970s roots. “I had a couple friends who were interior designer people come through, and they were like, ‘Paint the ceiling in here, and brighten it up,’ and do all this stuff. And I just can’t do it,” laughs Moore. “There’s something about it. The old is still here, and I’m trying to bring in some new. But there are stains and marks everywhere that represent years and years of life in this house.”

There are years of life and history in the surrounding hills as well. Winter rains uncover clay and pebbles that Moore collects and brings back to her studio to wire into jewelry. The rains also rejuvenate the river flows and give a flush of green and gold to the landscape. “There are materials all around us…That’s country life, you know?” says Moore.

The crispness of early winter in the Alexander Valley means vineyards turning colors and native plants starting to grow back. “Winter isn’t empty; it’s really beautiful. More sculptural for sure, because the leaves are off the oaks, and the grasses are laid down,” says Bannister. “You can see the shapes of the branches and how they’re framed, and you can really see a large swath of the valley from the house.”

A few years back, a winter storm washed up the waterlogged trunk of a huge black walnut tree onto a nearby sandbar of the Russian River. Where someone else might see a tangle to clear away, Bannister saw a once-in-a-lifetime project. He and a friend cut the walnut into logs and hauled them out of the river to mill into slabs, which took a couple of years to cure. Stained and shaped into live-edge cabinet fronts, that walnut is now the hallmark of the family’s character-filled kitchen.

“To start with something as crazy as a giant tree lying on the bank… it’s kind of a long, interesting process where you have to be patient and have some faith,” says Bannister. “Only later on do you find out what you’ve got.”

This sustainable, local approach to craft is deeply resonant for Bannister and Moore, who are motivated by a desire to conserve the land for the future and their young son.

“We have cut down millions of trees that ended up just being wasted. I’ve always just hated that, how little value is placed on keeping old-growth trees in the forest and not cutting them down,” says Bannister. “So when I got interested in making furniture, I was inevitably pushed towards salvaged and reclaimed stuff. It’s just more beautiful than anything you can buy from a supplier. I’m not interested in making stuff out of trees that came out of rainforests.”

Monroe explored carving spoons from the same walnut that Bannister used for the kitchen cabinets. In fact, the couple often find themselves drawn to the same stones, clay and other natural materials. “That’s the cool thing,” explains Moore. “Artistically, we don’t always go together, but eventually Brook and I end up at the same spot.”

And as the family wanders through the chapters of their creative life, the spaces of their home continue to evolve. “You use a room one way for a while, and then you want to do something different with it,” says Bannister. “You look at it as a template.”

“The house is like a canvas that receives your creativity as it comes. It’s seeing what happens over time.”