A Lagunitas tea seller is standing his ground after a receivership, an appeal that reached the California Supreme Court, national news coverage and, finally, an eviction order.
David Lee Hoffman has been fighting the county for 30 years over what may be the most celebrated illegal structures in Marin. For years, the prospect of eviction has loomed for the Lagunitas tea merchant, who acknowledges his experiments in sustainability and fantastical Tibetan-inspired architecture are unlawful.
Earlier this year, after an appeal ricocheted back from the state supreme court, the California Court of Appeal for the First District stood firm on its ruling. Mr. Hoffman was directed to vacate the Last Resort, as his property is known, by Dec. 2.
But that day came and went. Reached by phone this week, Mr. Hoffman, 78, said he was staying put and recovering from a bout of Covid-19. He directed questions to his lawyer, who is not giving up the fight.
“This is a moving target and I don’t consider that the legal issues are over,” said Ann Draper, Mr. Hoffman’s attorney, who is representing him pro bono. She did not want to compromise her legal strategy by discussing the active case.
But Dunya Alwan, an architectural designer who advises Mr. Hoffman on the Last Resort, said there were still opportunities to preserve his handiwork and allow him to live out his days there. She pointed to the Marin County Architectural Commission’s own finding, in 2016, that the structures are architecturally significant. Mr. Hoffman should not preemptively vacate, she suggested, until the county has resolved what she saw as an internal contradiction between the court and the commission.
“The conundrum at the county needs exposure,” said Ms. Alwan, who sits on the board of the Lagunitas Project, a nonprofit formed by Mr. Hoffman’s supporters. “It feels like there’s some kind of knot that needs to be untied in order to preserve the site.”
Supervisor Dennis Rodoni expressed sympathy for Mr. Hoffman and admiration for his “unique” property, but he said he saw no opportunity for him to stay. The receiver would have to sell the property to recover the large sums of money the county has lost in unpaid property taxes and legal costs, Supervisor Rodoni said, but he hoped the Lagunitas Project could preserve the buildings for non-residential use. “Someone’s going to have to buy it,” he said. “My ultimate hope is that it’s going to be the nonprofit.”
Mr. Hoffman’s free-spirited approach has long clashed with a permitting process that became increasingly rigorous, especially in the San Geronimo Valley. He bought the rugged, forested two acres tucked in the Lagunitas hills in 1973, when, as he often remarks, local officials could be lax about building permits.
Mr. Hoffman continued in that tradition, building nearly 40 unpermitted structures over the years, from a pagoda and a cave where he stores aged pu’er tea to an elaborate system of wastewater and greywater devices like his outdoor shower tower and worm-powered composting toilet.
But in the late 1980s, an incensed neighbor began complaining to the county, and in 1998, a co-owner of one of the parcels lodged her own complaint about an unpermitted retaining wall made of wooden tea boxes.
To visiting friends and tea enthusiasts, the Last Resort is a dreamlike, exquisitely creative experiment in sustainability. To county officials, it’s a public nuisance where code violations are “so extensive and of such a nature that the health and safety of the occupants, neighboring residents and the general public is substantially endangered,” according to a 2015 court opinion.
The violations are too many to count, and Mr. Hoffman has done little to remedy them, according to court documents. Among other complaints, county staff pointed to his composting toilets and greywater recycling devices, which were not connected to a traditional septic system and could spill over into a watercourse that runs through the property. Mr. Hoffman also ran his tea business, the Phoenix Collection, out of the property without a commercial use permit for years before moving to a space in a small strip mall in Lagunitas.
In 2007, he claimed unsuccessfully that his property could be exempt from the code violations because it was a film set, having been featured in Les Blank’s documentary “All in This Tea” that year. Five years later, the county rejected an attempt he made to bring his structures into compliance through documentation by engineers and an architect.
In 2015, after Mr. Hoffman failed to comply with an order from an administrative law judge to fix his violations, the judge appointed a receiver to take charge of the property. The receiver had the power to evict Mr. Hoffman and sell the property if he didn’t comply with plans to demolish certain buildings and legalize others.
But the receivership found little to help Mr. Hoffman keep the property, which was subject to about $1 million in liens and defaulted taxes, and would need a million more in rehabilitation costs. Mr. Hoffman’s supporters and a group of volunteers formed the Lagunitas Project to raise money toward acquiring the property for preservation, but they pulled together just a small fraction of the necessary funds.
In May 2021, a Marin County judge gave the receiver, Eric Beatty, permission to put the Last Resort on the market, giving Mr. Hoffman three months to vacate. His lawyer quickly appealed the ruling. The court of appeals first dismissed the challenge, but in February, Mr. Hoffman’s case was reviewed by the California Supreme Court, which directed the appeals court to take another look. In July, a final decision reaffirmed the dismissal, and Mr. Hoffman had until last Friday to leave.
Now that Mr. Hoffman has overstayed the deadline, the Lagunitas Project is focused on architectural preservation, which could provide a path to legality. If the county grants the Last Resort landmark status, it could become subject to the more lenient historic building code.
“We’re hoping to exhaust every avenue for preservation,” Ms. Alwan said. “The goal is that he lives there as long as he wants and that it be preserved in perpetuity.”