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A Discovery at Every Elevation
A hillside property becomes a private destination for movement, entertainment, recreation, and retreat, where every change in elevation creates another reason to stay.
Leisure Architecture
The Architecture
of Escape.
Designing with land, life, and imagination as one experience.
Some places are built to be seen. A Micro Resort is designed to be entered, felt, and lived. From the first moment of arrival, the experience begins to unfold. The space becomes a setting for retreat, gathering, movement, restoration, and wonder, with every layer of design and engineering resolved to make the place feel effortless.
37.5485° N / 121.9886° WFremont · California
36Years
of custom design-build
ASLA / AEP
Landscape architecture + environmental planning
Leisure Architecture
Places shaped around presence
Proof
No two places ask for
the same transformation.
One hillside becomes a private destination. One backyard gets the drainage and structure it needs before becoming a room for reunion. One estate unfolds as a journey through arrival, gathering, and retreat. What stays consistent is the way Micro Resorts thinks: begin with the experience a place is meant to create, then resolve the architecture, landscape, and engineering required to make it feel effortless, enduring, and alive to the senses.
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Room for Reunion
Drainage problems were the starting point. What emerged was a backyard the family now thrives in together.
A Ruby in the Hills
A one-acre hillside estate unfolds through sensory zones for retreat and gathering, where fire, water, light, and sound keep the experience alive after dark.
The most valuable luxury is not space
It is presence.
Not limited by size, a Micro Resort is defined by
the feeling it creates and the life it makes possible.
Eco Farm Park
When the land has to give back more than it takes.
A working landscape where recreation, habitat, natural resources and human presence are designed as one system.
See the work
Soundlites
Light you can hear.
Sound you can see.
Elder invented Soundlites in 2002: a single fixture that carries light and sound as one. Vertical audio-wave technology delivers 360-degree, non-directional sound that stays inside the space it belongs to. What began as one fixture is becoming a language.
See the workHow We Work
Difficult sites rarely fail because the vision is too ambitious.
They fail when the land, the design, and the realities of building are treated as separate conversations. Micro Resorts carries terrain, structure, water, and experience as one body of judgment, so a complex property arrives at review already resolved instead of still arguing with itself.
Where Projects BreakThe land speaks first
Terrain, water, exposure, access, soil, and habitat are read together so the site’s hardest truths become design intelligence instead of late-stage surprises.
The Practitioner
The work begins before the brief is ever written.
Long before a terrace, lanai, or water feature is suggested, we listen for the intention beneath the request: the life a client is trying to reclaim, the escape a space might offer, the sensory experience a site has not yet revealed.
That shift from request to revelation is our practice’s signature. It turns constraints into direction, features into atmosphere, and overlooked places into environments with a more vivid future.
For more than 36 years, that way of listening has been led by our Founder and Chief Practitioner.
Meet Elder JerezElder listened to my vision, then challenged it. He asked what we were really trying to fix, solved the drainage issues we had lived with for years, and gave us a backyard we didn’t think was possible. Every time we look outside, we’re amazed.
Private client · Livermore, CA
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