Two blocks from the Lyon Street Steps, behind a garden wall at Lyon and Washington, is one of the most influential small buildings in American architecture. The Swedenborgian Church, completed in 1894, helped launch the Arts and Crafts movement in California: a collaboration among pastor Joseph Worcester, architect A. Page Brown, and a young Bernard Maybeck, with landscape paintings by William Keith inside.
The sanctuary’s roof rests on unpeeled madrone tree trunks hauled from the Santa Cruz Mountains, and a brick fireplace sits inside the church itself, a deliberate statement that worship could feel like a home. The chairs, made of maple and tule rush, were studied and copied by furniture makers for decades.
It is a National Historic Landmark, still an active congregation, and the garden and sanctuary are generally open on weekdays. Check the gate; entering is the point.
