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. 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. In 2020, the pair had told me about their decision to forgo intubation should one of them contract Covid and require a ventilator. I sensed that clear-eyed lack of sentiment at play here too, and wondered how Brand and Phelan—who is a cofounder and executive director of Revive & Restore, a biotech nonprofit devoted to wildlife conservation—were designing this phase of life. As I returned for multiple visits, I found that neither Brand nor Phelan see the new house as a way of coping with decline. They view it as an extension of their romance. It was February when I drove back to Petaluma from San Francisco, punching a code into a gate off the highway and heading down an unpaved road, past a cow pasture and over some railroad tracks, until marshlands unfolded before me. Phelan and her Labrador retriever greeted me, and we walked up a hill to the houses. The new building—they call it their studio—was nearly finished, and she and Brand entered it with me. She warned that he might only be good for a half hour or so. The conversation ended up going for more than 90 minutes, with the topic exhausted before Brand was. We cluster into a small living space with a sofa and chair. A stack of books is on a side table. Phelan explained that her main goal was to prevent their home life from collapsing under the demands of caregiving. “I wanted to ensure that throughout his ordeal with his illness, that he would have agency, and that I would have agency—that I wouldn't feel like I was the nursemaid when I want to be his wife,” she said. We do a walk-through of the studio, all 715 square feet of it. Off of the living space, under an arch, is a motorized bed. There are no rails, and it looks nothing like hospital equipment. Brand grabs a remote and playfully shows me how it rises and kneels. The kitchen counters are lower than usual, to accommodate Brand if he ever needs a wheelchair. The bathroom is the space that’s most optimized for accessibility. The shower has no enclosure, making it easy to enter and exit, and there’s a deep, Japanese-style tub with a folding seat that doubles as a step into the basin. We settle into the living area, and the conversation drifts to managing the very final stage of life. Phelan and Brand discuss the ethics of “taking the cocktail” for a graceful farewell. The couple has given it a lot of thought. Phelan makes it clear that she doesn’t see the house as a staging area for such an exit. For the time being there’s no need, and we return to the subject of the house we’re sitting in. We discuss the planning, the strategy, the architect, the contractors. I say I’d like to talk to those contractors, and Phelan gives me the name of a father-and-son team, Steve and Wes Coffin. I tell her that’s a little weird. “We never thought about that,” says Phelan. Pause. “It’s a wee grim.” But Brand is delighted. “This is the nicest coffin!” he crows. “Woo hoo!” The story of this Petaluma studio begins a half century ago when Patty Phelan, a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, applied for a job at the Whole Earth organization, which at the time was a loose confederation of projects, including the catalog and a quarterly magazine. (She began using her middle name, Ryan, years later. It was a better fit for her get-shit-done personality.) As she recounts this, Brand interrupts. “I hired her because I was in love with her,” he says. “No, you didn’t,” she says. “She was basically jailbait at that point,” Brand jokes. (Phelan was 25 and Brand was 39.) Early in their relationship, Phelan had returned to her apartment from a ballet class and suddenly felt debilitating pain in her abdomen. Brand rushed over and took her to the hospital. She was hustled into surgery for a burst ovarian cyst. As John Markoff describes it in his Brand biography, Whole Earth, when she came out of the operating room, Brand greeted her with a pillow he had recovered from her apartment. That’s when she knew—“This guy’s a keeper,” Phelan told Markoff. The pair had already discovered a shared zeal for unusual homes and big projects. In 1982, they impulsively paid $8,000 for the bones of a dilapidated wooden tugboat. “The wood was so rotten, you could grab handfuls of the bulwarks with your bare hands,” Brand wrote in How Buildings Learn. The tugboat, named Mirene, was built in 1912 in Coos Bay, Oregon, and after a long career of hauling cargo and pushing boats around, ended up moored on the Sausalito waterfront. Brand and Phelan had heard about a local builder named Pete Retondo and paddled a rowboat to his waterfront home to ask for help. Retondo wasn’t yet certified as an architect, but he led a crew that eventually rebuilt Mirene into an exquisite treasure, with a varnished wood interior and a versatile kitchen. They moved into the tugboat, and in October 1983, they got married. The Mirene was a joyful home. The dining table came from a nearby vessel that Otis Redding had occupied; legend has it that Redding wrote “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay” on that surface. The living section, toward the bow, has ample bookshelves, two leather easy chairs, and a wood stove. Every New Year’s Day, Brand and Phelan cruised the San Francisco Bay and invited their neighbors to join. The waterfront was full of young couples like them. “Lots of parties, people jumping off their boats into the water, lots of nudity,” says Phelan. There were drawbacks. A tugboat is a continued exercise in … maintenance. And patience. Their wood-paneled bedroom was in the pilot house, and they climbed an outside ladder to reach it. “After a decade or so, with almost everybody who lives on houseboats, what do they crave? Land,” Phelan says. One day in 2005, Brand and Phelan were sailing Mirene on the Petaluma River when they saw a beautiful property, a horse ranch just past the marshlands. It appeared to be abandoned. “Stewart and I looked at this derelict-looking farmhouse, and a big, huge hay barn falling in at the roof. And we both said, ‘Gosh, if we were ever going to buy a property, this is where we'd buy, right here on the river.’” At first, they couldn’t figure out how to get to the property, let alone find the address. They spent a few weekends driving up Highway 101 and heading down dusty private driveways. Finally they found the dirt road that led to the farm. It was owned by a woman who shared the deed with her siblings. She did not seem eager to sell. Brand gave her a copy of his book How Buildings Learn and eventually she softened. She bought out her siblings, and in 2005 Brand and Phelan took over. They hired the Coffins to renovate the farmhouse. “There was no foundation,” says Steve Coffin, the dad. When they opened up the walls, they found newspaper clippings from the 1890s. The couple then decided to make use of a guano-infested building on the property, the former schoolhouse. They used a crane to move it closer to the farmhouse. The first floor would become Brand’s library, with a spiral staircase leading to a second-floor guest bedroom with 7.5-foot windows. The windows were the first on the West Coast to use Ornilux, a special glass that’s detectable by birds. Phelan, after all, is an avid birder; she and Brand have spent a good part of the last 15 years in a genomic effort to revive the extinct passenger pigeon. For many years, Brand and Phelan continued living on their tugboat while spending long weekends on land. Phelan cultivated an elaborate garden and roamed the property with her dog. (“Mostly, we have 50 acres of marsh,” she says.) During Covid, they moved full-time to Petaluma. A tugbo