Kellam de Forest, a Santa Barbara native son with distinguished roots, died on January 19 from complications of COVID-19 at Cottage Hospital. He was born in that hospital on November 11, 1926, to noted landscape architects Elizabeth Kellam and Lockwood de Forest Jr. Kellam devoted the last decades of his life to preserving the aesthetic of the city they had helped design after the devastating 1925 earthquake, and for planners and historic preservationists alike, Kellam’s mere presence at a meeting raised the importance of the effort.
Both of Kellam’s parents were active in the community and instrumental in the rebuilding of post-earthquake Santa Barbara. His father was involved in planning and shaping the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden (where Kellam’s maternal grandfather, Frederick Kellam, was also active as a boardmember) from its founding in 1926, and also designed the grounds of the Museum of Art and the Lobero Theatre, among others. His mother left her mark on many civic institutions and, near the end of her life, was the supervising landscape architect for Alice Keck Park Memorial Garden. His paternal grandfather, Lockwood de Forest, was a painter and interior designer important in the Aesthetic Movement who moved to Santa Barbara in 1915 to a home on Laguna Street.
Born eight weeks premature and weighing only two pounds, Kellam was the smallest baby ever to survive at Cottage at that time; and survive he did, to our great good fortune. The de Forests lived in the home and garden his parents designed on Todos Santos Lane in Santa Barbara’s Mission Canyon, and Kellam attended nearby Roosevelt School before enrolling in Crane School. He attended high school at Thacher School in Ojai (also his father’s alma mater), where he once astonished the faculty by riding his horse home for the weekend.