ABOUT
Jill Lewis Architecture + Design has been in practice for twenty years, with studios in San Francisco and Palm Springs. We work across geographies, and have from the beginning. That range is not incidental; it is a practiced discipline. Every project demands its own immersion: into a site, a climate, a client, a way of living. We bring that focused attention wherever we work, guided by a single belief: a home is more than shelter. It is where a life actually happens, where daily rhythms find their shape and the way you want to live becomes real.
That is why we don't design to a style or a trend. We design to a person. To the specific way you move through a space, your relationship to light, the proportions that make a room feel right. A home designed this way should feel inevitable. Like it could only ever have been yours.
Place matters as much as the person. Every site carries its own story: a quality of light, a topography, a climate, a set of textures entirely its own. Before a line is drawn, we spend real time understanding all of it. The result is a home that feels at once effortless and deeply rooted in where it stands.
Founder Jill Lewis has spent twenty years in practice across four continents — Florence, Seattle, Hong Kong, Beijing, Buenos Aires — before establishing studios in San Francisco and Palm Springs. That breadth of experience informs everything the firm does, bringing a rare sensitivity to place, culture, and the particular demands of building at a high level.
We work with a select number of clients at any given time, by their side from the first concept conversation to move-in day. This kind of work demands sustained attention, iterative conversation, and the accumulated understanding that leads to something genuinely right. That process cannot be rushed, and we don't try.
The outcome is a home that is not simply beautiful. It earns that beauty through fitness: to your life, to the land, to the moment you're in.
The firm's work has been recognized with a Luxe National Red Award and named to the Luxe Gold List. It has been featured in Wallpaper*, Architectural Digest Italia, Elle Decor, Robb Report, Dwell, Palm Springs Life and Architizer, among others.
HOW WE THINK
HONESTY OF MATERIAL
A home should be exactly what it is. Concrete reads as concrete. Wood ages as wood. We don't dress materials up or ask them to pretend. There is a particular beauty in a building that is fully, confidently itself, and clients feel it even when they can't name it.
MORE THAN BEAUTY
The deepest thing a home can do is make you feel grounded, returned to yourself when you walk through the door. We design for that feeling deliberately. It comes from proportion, from the way light moves through a room, from the sense that a space was made for the life that happens inside it.
BEYOND THE VISUAL
Architecture is not only visual. The sound of rain on a roof, the coolness of a stone floor underfoot, the way morning light shifts across a wall. These are the things you actually live in. We pay attention to all of it.
A SENSE OF PLACE
The best homes do something quiet but profound: they orient the people who live in them. They hold a particular rootedness, a way of being in the world. We think of architecture not as decoration but as structure for a life, something that helps you remember who you are.
LEADERSHIP
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JILL LEWIS
PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT
I always knew I would be an architect. What I didn't know until I was commissioned to design a tiny apartment inside a 12th-century farmhouse in Prato was that homes were my real calling. I had just completed my Master of Architecture at Syracuse University's Florence program and was working in the studio of internationally acclaimed architect Massimo Carmassi, learning to introduce strikingly modern interventions into the most layered and complex of historical contexts. That lesson has never left me. I carried it through nearly a decade at a Seattle studio dedicated to high-end custom residential work, where I learned everything about the craft of designing, detailing and building homes for exacting clients.
Then came six years in Asia. In Hong Kong I worked on luxury residences, absorbing new construction methods and the cultural nuances of one of the world's most dynamic cities. We then moved deeper into the continent, to Beijing, where I founded an eco-friendly textile company rooted in traditional Chinese pattern and craft, and raised three small children while learning a new language and culture from the inside out. Five years in Buenos Aires followed, where I partnered with a local artist to renovate apartments in Palermo and Recoleta, managing construction myself and developing a hands-on fluency with building trades that informs every project I take on today.
My practice is now based in California, with studios in San Francisco and Palm Springs, two cities that reflect the two sides of my practice: urban and grounded, open and sun-drenched. Each project I take on is an opportunity to do what this long, winding path has prepared me for: to listen carefully, look closely, and make a home that is entirely of its place and entirely of the person who will live there.
MAGGIE COOPER
ARCHITECT
I am a licensed architect with a Master of Architecture degree and a minor in construction management from Washington State University, where the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest first shaped my understanding of what architecture can and should do. Growing up between the rugged beauty of Seattle, with its towering evergreens, salt air and moody skies, and the wide, rolling plains of the Palouse in eastern Washington gave me an early sensitivity to how climate, topography and natural light define the experience of a place. That sensitivity, combined with a relentless attention to detail and a deep fluency in 3D rendering, informs everything I bring to my work in residential design. I have seen firsthand how powerful a well-crafted rendering can be in helping clients truly understand and connect with their project before a single thing is built.
I am a keen observer of how people actually live, how families gather, how a home holds a life, something I return to every time I spend time with my own extended family. When I am not at my desk or on a job site, I am on the water in Puget Sound, boating, crabbing and paddleboarding, or settled into my family's classic mid-century modern home in the heart of Palm Springs, where the magic and extremes of the desert never get old. Time in landscapes like these is never wasted. It shows in my work.