From her first visit at age 16, Faith Wheeler was captivated by San Francisco. “I took one look at the sky and said, ‘Why doesn’t everyone live here?’” she recalls. “I was that smitten. It was just so beautiful.” In 1987, after several post-college years in New York, she moved to the City by the Bay with no job lined up, but eager for a change of scenery. “I got in the car and drove across the country and prayed,” she says with a laugh.
Wheeler quickly found work at an advertising agency and next a restaurant group, which led to a decadeslong career in food and wine, including developing media and marketing campaigns for high-profile restaurants and wineries. In 2011, she began dating her now-husband, John Lamar, and they ultimately settled in Marin County. Much like her gravitation to San Francisco, he felt a pull toward a particular place, too: Mexico, a frequent travel destination for the pair — and where they recently completed a vacation home.
On a trip in 2019, Richard Rutowski — a screenwriter, known for Natural Born Killers, turned realtor — showed them several properties in Todos Santos, a small town on the Baja Peninsula, about an hour’s drive north of Cabo San Lucas. The first three were a definite no. “We were going to give up, and then Richard said, ‘Well, I do have one more, but it’s in really bad shape,’” Wheeler recounts. “He almost didn’t show it to us. He didn’t realize that it would delight me.”
She was, after all, a serial renovator. “The restaurant industry is probably where I first started noticing visual elements of decor,” she says. In addition to the 1890s Marin residence that she and Lamar share, Wheeler had previously remodeled a Victorian in San Francisco and a turn-of-the-century farmhouse in Napa. Although the dwelling in Mexico was her inaugural ground-up project and presented new challenges — such as navigating regulations in a foreign country and building during a pandemic from 1,500 miles away — she was undaunted.
The 2-acre coastal property — “You can’t see the ocean, but you can hear the ocean,” Wheeler notes — once served as an inn, with an owner-occupied main house and two guest houses. It had since been neglected and seldom inhabited. The landscaping alone was a major undertaking, but the site was a selling point, with an abundance of mature trees surrounding their lot. “Our job was to build an oasis,” she says.
The couple razed one guest structure; the other, a palapa, was taken down to the studs. They stayed in the renovated thatched-roof casita while working with architect Kamal Schramm to construct the new main house. (Schramm has deep ties to the region; his family founded the renowned Rancho Las Cruces resort, where Desi Arnaz and Bing Crosby had homes.) “Our mission for the house was really simple: a classic hacienda with clean lines, high ceilings and a few contemporary strokes to keep it looking fresh,” Wheeler says.
The resultant two-story abode, which she describes as “a modern twist on Spanish Revival,” contains public spaces downstairs, including a double-height corridor with arched windows and doorways that invite natural light; living room with a built-in sofa comprising pulido, a material commonly used in Mexico, indoors and out; and dining room with palm tree murals painted on-site by Colombia-based artist Eloin Rivera over the course of six weeks. The second level is dedicated to the primary suite.
Adjoining the house are two en suite guest quarters, dubbed the “pink room” and “blue room” for their palettes; both are accessed through separate entrances. Along with multiple terraces and patios, alfresco gathering areas allure — like a fireplace flanked by benches, all composed of pulido. Nearby, amid lush landscaping that includes palm trees, agave plants and vibrant bougainvillea, poolside chaise lounges and umbrellas offer a shady respite.
While Wheeler acknowledges that a house in Mexico was “100% because of my new husband” — she and Lamar wed last summer — Todos Santos is now dear to her as well. In her newly released memoir-cookbook, Chickens Don’t Fly: A Kitchen Table Book, which features more than 100 recipes and photography by Clay McLachlan, each of the seven chapters highlights a locale of personal significance. Among them, San Francisco and Todos Santos.
On trips to the latter, “when we pull up to the house,” Wheeler says, “we exhale, and embrace our private oasis — with singing birds, a garden of exotic plants and the slap of waves, all down a windy dirt road with no address.”
Photos by David Duncan Livingston
