Practice
Elder Jerez
Some practitioners are hired for what they can build. Elder Jerez is sought out for what he can see.
His practice brings together Guatemalan roots, civil engineering, landscape architecture, EPCOT / Imagineering, and more than 36 years of field judgment into one rare way of reading land. The result is not a style. It is a point of view: listen deeply, find the real possibility, and shape places that change how people live.
In brief
A Guatemalan-born leisure landscape architect.
Elder Jerez is a Guatemalan-born leisure landscape architect whose path runs through civil engineering, UCLA, UC Berkeley, EPCOT / Imagineering, and decades of Bay Area estate work. His earlier practice helped define the idea of “Micro Resorts”: outdoor environments designed as complete leisure experiences, where comfort, atmosphere, and imagination become part of everyday life.
The background
Before Elder studied land, Guatemala taught him how to feel it.
Civil engineering taught him what it could hold. California gave him the discipline of landscape architecture. Imagineering showed him that a place could do more than work beautifully. It could create wonder.
The pivot
From spectacle to sanctuary.
Elder’s years in EPCOT / Imagineering showed him how land, movement, sound, water, and light could be composed in service of emotion: not only what people saw, but how they arrived, wandered, wondered, and remembered. Micro Resorts began when that same imagination turned toward a more intimate scale: a family celebrating, a guest discovering another reason to stay, a hillside unfolding into a new destination, and a backyard becoming a space for reconnection.Leisure Architecture, to me, is about listening for the happiness people have forgotten how to ask for. Sometimes it shows up in a story, or a smile, or a memory of a place they loved. My job is to catch that little spark and help their space give it back to them.
Elder Jerez
Recognition