Archive — Jamie Lyons
A garden in Santa Cruz. A child running through morning light.
The things that outlast the rest of the noise.
This house in Santa Cruz, this 1925 Craftsman Bungalow, it's got ghosts. Good ones. The kind that make you want to do right by a place. The kind that won't let you half-ass it.
For fifty years, this was Kay Metz's house. And Kay Metz? She was the real deal. A painter and printmaker who studied in Paris at Atelier 17, earned a MacDowell fellowship, then landed in Santa Cruz in 1971 and basically built the entire printmaking program at UC Santa Cruz from scratch. Abstract expressionist. Professor Emerita. The kind of woman who taught generations of artists to draw fast and loose, to stop overthinking it, to trust the gesture.
She died here in 2018. When we walked through for the first time, you could feel it, decades of turpentine and ink, coffee at dawn, the particular silence of someone working alone while the rest of the world sleeps. Her work hangs in the Library of Congress and the Phoenix Art Museum. But more than that, she left her mark on the wetlands, on her students, on this studio that still smells faintly of linseed oil if you know where to breathe. If you're paying attention.
While our offer was pending, our future neighbor Lance had a dream. Kay came to him, clear as day, and told him she thought we should have the house. Lance is the kind of guy who knows every plant within a three-block radius, the kind of gardener who can tell you why your hydrangeas are sulking and what that weird volunteer in the back corner actually is. So when he told me this later, matter-of-fact, like this is just how things work, I didn't question it. Because by then, I'd already felt it too. Some things you just know.
So here we are. An artist, a college professor, and our four-year-old kid who treats the backyard like it's his own private kingdom. We bought Kay's house not because we're precious about preservation or because we fetishize the past, but because some places deserve better than getting flipped into oblivion. This is us trying to figure out what comes next. We're keeping the bones—the craftsman details, the things that made this house sing in 1925. We're ripping out the bullshit—the cheap fixes, the compromises, the stuff that doesn't belong. And we're planting California natives like our lives depend on it, because maybe they do.
Our design philosophy, if you can call it that, is post-internet, critically-regionalist, and respectfully inflammatory. We mine the omnipotence of intentional inexactitude. We flirt with illegibility. We want to destroy the system with love and kindness. Yeah. That. We're not trying to freeze this house in amber. We're not building a museum to craftsman purity. We're living here. Working here. Raising a kid who drags mud through the kitchen and thinks native grasses are better than any playground. This is renovation as conversation with the dead. This is landscape architecture as middle finger to lawn culture.
Kay would have gotten it. She spent decades teaching people to trust their instincts, to work fast and loose, to stop being so goddamn careful all the time. So that's what we're doing. We're being careful where it matters, in honoring the structure, in choosing the right plants, in acknowledging we're doing all this on stolen Awaswas land. And we're being reckless everywhere else.
We have no particular identifiable style, because beauty is diverse, and because having a particular style sounds boring as hell. We revere the history of craftsman architecture and California landscape, but we also kind of want to blow it all up and start over. Both things can be true. We take issue with perfection, despite constantly striving for it. We honor the laborers who built this house a century ago, our pretentious plumber Steve, and Mike and Mike who helped us replace a mile of nob and tube wiring, the Awaswas people whose land this has always been, and the artist Kay Metz who made this place hum for half a century.
We're building this not for the civilization that's eating itself alive right now, but for whatever comes next. For the native plants that'll outlast us. For the kid who'll remember this place as the spot where he learned that beauty and mess are the same thing.
And we're doing it with love, kindness, California poppies, and the understanding that sometimes the best way to honor the past is to let it get a little wild.
Finca Fiasco · Santa Cruz, California · Awaswas Land · In Progress · Always
2025
The thing about this shot is it captures what i can’t hold onto: Lindsey and Charlie, backlit against a city that’s just starting to make sense to the kid, or maybe never will. Every photograph I make carries the weight of every moment that made me capable of seeing this one. Every song that wrecked […]
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2025
At first, when you unlock the studio door, when you pull out the brushes or the charcoal or whatever the hell you’re working with that day, it’s packed in there. Every single person you’ve ever known is crammed into that space with you. Your first music teacher who said you had potential but lacked discipline, […]
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2025
Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1932, back when America thought it had figured out what it wanted to be, she got out. Did the expected thing first: BFA from Bowling Green, MFA from UCLA. But then she did what artists who actually give a damn do: she went to Paris in 1966, to Atelier 17, […]
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Well, as you can plainly see, the possibilities are endless like meandering paths in a great big beautiful garden. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch I’ve been places. I’ve seen things. I’ve eaten meals that cost more than my first car and stood in front of art that makes you question everything you thought you knew […]
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2022
Father’s Day, 2022. Lindsey’s taken us to Stanford, which is either the most perfect thing she could have done or the cruelest, depending on how you look at it. This is the place where my father taught. Where I grew up. Where I went to school. Every corner of this campus is a ghost, a […]
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2021
I’m not going to bullshit you about some mystical awakening or whatever the fuck people claim happens when they see big trees. But laying there on a bed of redwood needles looking up at five month old Charlie, this tiny perfect human who somehow shares my DNA, held by Lindsey in that cathedral of redwoods? […]
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2021
Look at this photograph. Lindsey with Charlie at four and a half months. I took this picture and I remember thinking: I need to capture this. Not for Instagram, not for the baby book, not for some future slideshow at his wedding. I needed it for him. For later. For when he’s fifteen or twenty-five […]
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2021
Week One Charlie, and here’s what nobody told me at the baby shower while they’re cooing over the organic onesies and making jokes about sleep deprivation like it’s some kind of sitcom punchline instead of the existential throat-punch it actually is: I’m not ready. I will NEVER be ready. And every single smiling face who […]
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