Steven Keylon

Steven Keylon is an architectural historian based in Palm Springs. He writes, researches, and lectures about California’s built environment, with a particular interest in its historic gardens and designed landscapes. His work usually begins with a single place — a house, a courtyard, a golf course — and the people who made it: the architect, the landscape architect, the client, the gardener.

He has edited Eden, the journal of the California Garden & Landscape History Society, since 2017, and was the society’s president from 2013 to 2017. In 2023 the society and its journal received a California Governor’s Historic Preservation Award. His own articles for the journal range from the landscape of Dodger Stadium to the smoke trees of Palm Springs to the indoor-outdoor rooms of Van Keppel-Green.

His books include The Design of Herbert W. Burns and The Modern Architecture of Hugh Michael Kaptur, studies of two Palm Springs designers, and Tom O’Donnell: Generous Spirit of Palm Springs, written with Steve Vaught and Tracy Conrad. He edited Canyon Country Club and contributed essays to Shaping the Postwar Landscape and California Eden. Several have received Independent Publisher Book Awards. He is now writing a biography of the landscape architect Tommy Tomson.

Alongside the writing, he prepares the documentation that protects historic places — more than a dozen Class 1 historic site nominations for the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation among them. His cultural-landscape work includes the report for the Village Green in Los Angeles, a National Historic Landmark, and award-winning projects at the Hindry House in Pasadena and the Historic American Landscape Survey of the Virginia Robinson Gardens in Beverly Hills, both honored by the California Preservation Foundation.

He is a board member of the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation, a founding member of the Stewardship Council of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, and sits on the advisory board of Docomomo US/SoCal. He lives in Palm Springs.