Nina Annette Sable-Lavery

Nina Sable-Lavery

August 20, 1959 to November 26, 2025

The beautiful and radiant Nina, beloved mother, wife, sister, aunt, and friend, was born in San Jose, California, the youngest of four and grew up in the nearby town of Los Gatos. She passed away at home in Petaluma, California surrounded by loved ones on the day before Thanksgiving. She was in hospice care at home after an eight-month struggle with cancer. She is survived by her devoted husband Allan Lavery and beloved daughter Megan Lavery.

Through all of her life experience her greatest sense of fulfillment came from two things: being a mother and embracing the artist that was her authentic self. Everything she did from the day her daughter Megan was born was motivated by what she thought would prepare her to be a confident young woman prepared to find her place in the world. That included exposure to the arts like music, dance, theater, drawing and painting. The house was always full of art supplies and an endless variety of creative projects.

The formative experiences of her life were well established by the importance they held in her own telling of her life story. Her earliest memories were of the construction of the new home that her parents built in Los Gatos that was designed for them by a woman architect. Nina’s favorite pet when she a child was a Samoyed dog named Trinka. So when the time came that her own daughter wanted a dog, it was the little white Samoyed snowball named Purple who became part of the family. 

Nina attended elementary school at Oak Street School in Saratoga, California. When she was ten years old, she moved with her family to England for two years so that her father, a family practice physician, could work on an advanced degree in radiation therapy to treat cancer. For those two years she was a student in Northwood College, a British public school for girls 14 miles from central London. While living in England she met her Aunt Lydia and a cousin Pierre who lived in Antwerp, Belgium. Back home in Los Gatos, she attended Saratoga High School where she excelled on the swim team. She also loved being part of the drama club and worked on the production of school plays. After high school she attended California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, initially concentrating on ceramics, then taking a break and coming back to enroll in the interior design program, and then finally finishing with a professional degree of Bachelor of Architecture. Some of her architecture classes were at the University of California Berkeley, which was one in a chain of events that led to meeting her husband Allan.

During the summer of her sixteenth birthday she returned to Europe as an exchange student living with a French family in Bordeaux. That time gave her a lifelong friendship with her French “sister” Veronique. Nina also became conversationally fluent in French so that she could hold her own in the native tongue dealing with anyone in Paris when she returned in 2005 with Allan to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s Eve. She had also taken every French course that was available in high school and college.

Her third major experience of living in Europe came right after the Berlin wall was opened and was coming down. She lived in Berlin for half a year and was one of the first Americans to visit East Germany. She worked in the office of a well-established female architect producing ink drawings. She was thrilled to be there for the exposure to the cultural richness of the art, fashion, music, architecture, and history amid the confusion and excitement of the first steps toward German national reunification.

Nina was a spiritually centered person. She was brought up in a family that attended Friends Meeting (the Quakers). She was a lifelong advocate of truth, non-violence and opposition to war. From a young age she was also attracted to Catholic spirituality. As an adult she completed the course of instruction and was fully initiated into the Catholic Church at the 2022 Easter Vigil service. At the same time she loved reading tarot cards, something that connected her to a surprising number of friends who shared that interest.

Nina had an energetic entrepreneurial spirit. She had several successful business ventures in her life. In her twenties she started It’s The Best Dessert dipping fruit in chocolate from a store in Danville, California that she designed and remodeled herself. She provided thousands of chocolate-dipped strawberries to weddings, hotels, restaurants and even a San Francisco TV talk show.

After graduating with a degree in architecture, she worked for a variety of architecture firms on residential and commercial projects. But she always wanted to run her own business. In 1999 she set up her own architecture office with her husband Allan. She worked on numerous custom homes and commercial tenant improvements, but she was most proud of her work on the design of the medical offices for the Rossmoor medical group in Walnut Creek, California.

Ultimately, it was the artistic side of design that was her passion. In everything she did she always saw things with an artist’s eye for detail, color and light. She did wonderful detailed pen and ink sketches. She had won prizes in art competitions, and she had worked in an artist’s studio producing large scale paintings for architectural installations in new buildings. In recent years Nina turned her focus to creating works of fine art that she was starting to market on her own website. It was her dream to launch an art business, and she was still trying to make progress on that in her last few months.

Nina was preceded in death by her father Dr. Morris Sable, M.D., by her mother Ethel Haslinger Sable, and by her brother Arthur Edmund Sable. She is survived by her sisters Stephanie Bierman and Diane Padurean, nieces Sara Sable McCann, Sarah Bierman, and Graciela Sable Lewit, and nephew Arthur E. Sable.

A celebration of life will be held on Friday, January 16, 2026, at 11:00 A.M. at Adobe Creek Funeral Home, 331 Lakeville Street, Petaluma, CA 94952.