Designing the Dream House of an 87-Year-Old Tech Visionary

This past January, Stewart Brand published a book, Maintenance of Everything: Part One. “Maintenance is what keeps everything going,” he begins. “It’s what keeps life going.”

Brand’s life has been going for 87 years, but lately the going has been tough. The man known for creating the Whole Earth Catalog—the 1960s countercultural guide to self-sufficiency that Steve Jobs was fond of—has an incurable disease and is down to 130 pounds, an alarming weight for a nearly 6-footer. Brand’s mind is sharp as ever; you can’t talk to the man for five minutes without learning something. But his once-nimble movements are now cautious, and he’s never far from an oxygen tank. Stewart Brand’s body, in other words, requires constant maintenance.

Stewart Brand works in his library on his second Maintenance of Everything book.

Brand is an icon. Besides the Catalog, he’s written a shelf full of books on a panoply of topics. I’ve known him for more than 40 years. In 1968, he worked behind the scenes of what became known as the Mother of All Demos, which introduced the modern computer interface to the world. He was a godfather-like presence in the first years of WIRED. Brand is the living connection between computing’s counterculture roots and the modern world, where his voice still resonates.

Last fall I visited Brand and his wife, Ryan Phelan, at their home, a former horse farm in Petaluma, 40 miles north of San Francisco. The property looks out on an expanse of brown marshes, the Petaluma River, and off to the east, a low horizon of green rolling hills. On a small hill are three buildings with white siding and stately green roofs. The couple lives in one of those buildings, an updated farmhouse that’s more than a century old. Another resurrected building, a former schoolhouse, contains Brand’s book-lined workspace. But it was the third structure, tucked between these two, that interested me. This house was just being completed. As we sat on the wooden porch of the new structure, Brand and Phelan explained to me that it had been speedily—but thoughtfully—constructed to accommodate Brand as he copes with age and illness.

Brand is a world-class pragmatist and a philosopher of structures; he once wrote a book called How Buildings Learn about how homes and commercial properties evolve over time. This bespoke house—essentially an inhabitable prosthetic—struck me as an expression of Brand and Phelan’s Whole Earth-ish strategy for playing the losing hand that biology deals us.

The studio, built to accommodate Brand’s later years, is a short hop from the farmhouse he shares wi