Landscape Architecture Firm is Risk that Paid Off

San Diego Business Journal

By Ray Huard

May 31, 2023

DESIGN: McCullough Working on Big Local, Int’l Projects

When David McCullough opened his own landscape architecture firm in 1999, he took a big risk.

His wife, Catherine McCullough, was pregnant, they had just bought a house, and the firm was just David, working out of a small office in the Gaslamp Quarter on 5th Avenue near the San Diego Convention Center.

He’d been working for another landscape architecture firm.

“I decided, you know what, I can do this on my own,” McCullough said. “It all worked out, fortunately.”

Catherine McCullough took a risk of her own, giving up a lucrative marketing career to join her husband in 2001.

David McCullough, ASLA, PLA
Founder and Principal Landscape Architect
McCullough Landscape Architecture

“We had our first child and a mortgage, and we already had taken a huge leap, so this was a second big leap to try to run a business together,” McCullough said. “In retrospect, I look back at it now and think, ‘Oh my God, what was I thinking?’”

Catherine McCullough took over the business end of the firm as CEO in 2002, and from those risky, early days, McCullough has grown, moving its headquarters to Hillcrest and expanding its staff to 15.

So, too, have the projects it does, reaching as far away as China.

McCullough Landscape is working with Gafcon as the landscape architect on the first two phases of Zizhu High Tech Industrial City – an 800-acre community in South Shanghai surrounded by a river and canals.

The first two phases include a lake, a commercial district, hotel, family entertainment park, arboretum and artist community.

As described by McCullough, the firm was asked to study the gardens that will surround a business hotel. The installation, known as the Purple Garden, will be on an island at the perimeter of Purple Lake, spanning nearly 100 acres and connecting both sides of the Huangpu River with a pedestrian-focused park system.

“As the landscape architect, we’re the ones dealing with everything that has to do with the site and stitching together the various architectural pieces with what we call the public realm,” McCullough said.

Closer to home, McCullough Landscape in 2013 was chosen as the landscape architect for San Diego State University.

The firm also is working with the City of Santee and architect Mark Steele, founder and president of the MW Steele Group, on the design of an arts district and updating the city’s specific plan.

The firm also is working with Toll Brothers and the North County Transit District on the redevelopment of the 10.20-acre site of the Oceanside Transit Center.

“It’s just an incredibly exciting project for me, because I just feel that Oceanside is such an incredible community,” said McCullough, who says he sort of fell into a career in landscape architecture.

In high school, McCullough wanted to be an architect. But when he got to Ventura College, a career counselor said that architecture was listed as an impacted program, meaning that there were lots of people wanting to take architecture courses. The counselor suggested landscape architecture as an alternative.

“My grandmother asked me why I wanted to mow lawns for the rest of my life. I had no idea what it was. Landscape architect wasn’t even a term for me,” McCullough said.

He quickly learned through an introductory course he took at Ventura College, before transferring to California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture.

“It’s such a broad profession,” McCullough said. “There are so many aspects. You have the ability to sort of design the profession the way you want it.”

McCullough said that the governing philosophy of landscape architecture has long been to preserve nature, but how that is interpreted has shifted.

“In the past, the way we would preserve nature is, we would put up fences around it and tell human beings to stay out,” McCullough said. “We’ve learned how to protect it. We’re pretty good at that as human beings. The next part is how do we become part of it in a symbiotic way.”

McCullough Landscape Architecture

Founded: 1999
Headquarters: Hillcrest
CEO and President: Catherine McCullough, FSMPS, CPSM
Business: Landscape Architecture + Urban Design
Employees: 16
Website: www.McCulloughLA.com
Contact: 619-296-3150

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