James Lord and Roderick Wyllie aren’t the types for New Year’s resolutions. Sudden and dramatic transformations aren’t their style. As principals of Surfacedesign, the landscape architecture and urban design firm behind such city landmarks as Lands End Lookout and the Golden Gate Bridge Plaza, they believe that worthwhile changes take time to root, blossom, and mature.
This philosophy applies to everything they touch, from the new 5.4-acre, $32 million Mission Bay Bayfront Park, which had an infamous, decade-long gestation period, to their own home, a century-old structure perched on the steep western slope of Corona Heights. The tall, narrow building has been tastefully nipped, tucked, and tugged over the 20 years they’ve lived there, its ceilings lifted, walls realigned, and bathrooms refreshed. Yet it retains the genes of the original Edwardian architecture: wood-framed windows, simple and symmetrical paneling, and double bay windows that add a riot of angles to an otherwise tightly edited living room.
Lord and Wyllie bought the three-unit building with friends back in 2003. The couple lived on the top floor, tweaking the petite and quirky space, with its deep, asymmetrical eaves and ancient windows, to make it work. Their friends lived in the main unit below, while the basement level was rented out, often to young artists and acquaintances from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Lord and Wyllie had met as students of landscape architecture at Harvard, but Wyllie was born and raised in San Francisco, and when they returned to his hometown after graduation, the young designers quickly fell in with the creative community thriving here in the 1990s.
Lord was working for the renowned Berkeley landscape architect Peter Walker in 2001 when he and Wyllie launched Surfacedesign as a side project. By 2006, their client list was sturdy enough that they could dive in full time. They set up their starter office in their home’s ground-floor rental unit.
Over the years, the building’s configurations and permutations continued to shift, with the friends eventually moving on, and Lord and Wyllie combining the second- and third-floor units for themselves. Walls were extracted, exposing the original shared central staircase, which became the star of their new living room. A slender, steel fireplace and a slate-colored Normann Copenhagen pendant light reminiscent of an oversize cowbell are the room’s defining features. The furniture is noticeably low-slung: An ocher Tufty-Time sofa by Patricia Urquiola and a woven ottoman are made for lounging as much as sitting, while a marble coffee table rises no more than a foot off the ground. It’s a vibe familiar to anyone who has spent time gathered around a campfire seated on chunky tree stumps with felled logs laid horizontally to serve as plein air benches.
“I’m more inclined to lie down than sit upright,” says Wyllie, who is used to designing flexible park elements that can function as chairs, tables, lounges, or launching pads for leaping children.
But it’s the art that draws the eyes back up — the couple’s collection is both extensive and exquisite. Hearing Wyllie describe each piece is less like getting a gallery tour and more like getting the skinny on a gaggle of eccentric friends. One of the first pieces one sees upon entering the main living space is a large-scale color photograph of two young men, both sans pants, one holding a shotgun. Wyllie recalls that the subjects and creators, Joshua Trees and Yvan Martinez were promising young artists at SF Art Institute, and this was their capstone project. He and Lord bought it from the school’s on-site gallery.
He points out pieces by Leigh Wells of Sausalito; Pedro Friedeberg of Mexico City; Karen Kals “Lulu” Ezekiel, a North Beach fixture who died a year ago; and the late, legendary Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, one of the first people to call for the conservation of the Amazon rainforest.
“Roberto was just an amazing, gigantic figure to us. He wrote cookbooks and sang opera and did paintings and created this native plant nursery for Brazil,” Wyllie says. “James went to Brazil in the ’90s and spent time with him and drew with him. This is a piece that Roberto gave to James, so it’s really a meaningful little souvenir of that time.”
Down a short hallway is their bedroom, decorated simply with a few art pieces and textiles from Lord’s native New Zealand. It opens to the library, a sunny space set with a hefty wood table that doubled as the couple’s makeshift Covid office.
A door opens to a stair winding down to their small but bucolic garden, the southern exposure diffused by an overgrown agave, a lemon tree heavy with fruit, and a profusion of mature succulents. It’s a living decoupage of plants that have snagged the couple’s interest over the years. “When we started, we were really interested in succulents, but we’ve since gravitated toward other species, and so now it’s a little bit of a hodgepodge,” says Wyllie.
A whisper of patio furniture nearly disappears into the tangle of shadows cast by the greenery. The pieces are by the Japanese architect Junya Ishigami; Wyllie refers to them as “ghosts.” “Everything that he does is incredibly light,” he says of Ishigami, whose work he discovered at the Salone del Mobile, a furniture fair in Milan. “A lot of his work is almost invisible.”
On the top floor, the space hasn’t changed dramatically from when the couple lived there exclusively. The kitchen is the showpiece of the home, with custom dark walnut shelves carved into every nook, emphasizing the former attic’s odd angles. “Over the years, we added more and more shelving, and this space evolved,” says Wyllie, who loves to wake up early and take in the sunrise from the dining table.
The floor-to-ceiling windows framing a million-dollar view of Bernal Hill are actually doors that were sealed shut. “They were cheaper than windows,” admits Wyllie, who says that maybe one day they’ll add a deck and crack open the doors. “With this house, we just kind of chip away at things as we can.”
The downstairs rental is now home to Wyllie’s father, who is a spry 92 and still works full time in real estate. Surfacedesign outgrew the quaint home office setup years ago: Today, the firm has a staff of more than 30 who work out of gleaming offices on the Embarcadero’s Pier 33.
It’s clear that neither Lord or Wyllie crave instant gratification. Instead, they have embraced a slow-design mentality that has allowed them to help shape the city they love, slice by slice. “The city is always evolving, and it’s always restless,” says Wyllie. He understands the frustrations of residents who want the most pressing problems solved quickly, but he also preaches patience — and persistence.
“It’s a little bit like a garden. It takes time. It’s not always solvable in six months,” he says. “Like a complex landscape, it’s gonna take a little while. That’s just what it is.”