In Memoriam
Michael Imlay, Longtime Land Concern Vice President and Principal, Dies at 80
Michael Theron Imlay, longtime Vice President and Principal of Land Concern, passed away on August 17, 2026, his 80th birthday and 58th wedding anniversary.
Mike spent more than five decades in landscape architecture, and it showed in everything from the projects he led to the designers who came up under him. You can still see his hand in a lot of what Land Concern does today.
Early Life and Career
Born in Altadena in 1946, Mike studied landscape architecture at Cal Poly Pomona. He got his start working alongside Rob Sawyer at Courtland Paul/Arthur Beggs and Associates in Pasadena. When Rob left in 1974 to start his own firm, Robert M. Sawyer and Associates, he brought Mike along, the beginning of a partnership that lasted the rest of their careers. It was Mike, in fact, who came up with the name Land Concern, which the company still goes by.
Rob Sawyer and Mike, whose decades-long partnership shaped Land Concern.
Design was where Mike came alive. He had strong opinions about it, but he wasn’t precious about his own ideas. He’d push the designers around him to try different approaches, and he genuinely wanted to hear what they came up with.
He was also just easy to be around. Mike could strike up a conversation with anyone, a client, a contractor, somebody he’d met five minutes earlier, and people tended to remember him for that as much as for his design work.
Mike at work.
A Mentor to Generations of Designers
Over the years, Mike ended up mentoring a lot of people at Land Concern, not in any formal sense, just by being someone people could bring their work to. He liked the process of figuring things out together, and a lot of designers at the firm today learned that habit from him.
Mike reviewing construction at Inn at the Mission, San Juan Capistrano.
A Life Rooted in San Juan Capistrano
His work took him all over California and even into Texas, but San Juan Capistrano was always different. Mike and his wife, Kathi, raised their family there, and over the decades his work and his life in that city became hard to separate.
Some of his projects are woven into the heart of the city: Mission San Juan Capistrano, Mission Basilica, the Mission Gatehouse, Historic Town Center Park. He worked in the Los Rios area too, and spent time with the San Juan Capistrano Historical Society.
He gave back to the city outside of his paid work as well, sitting on the Architectural Board of Review and helping shape San Juan Capistrano’s city entry monument program.
Inn at the Mission, San Juan Capistrano
Mission Gatehouse, Mission San Juan Capistrano
Retirement and Lasting Legacy
Mike retired during the COVID-19 pandemic. Inn at the Mission was one of the last projects he worked on before he stepped away, a fitting one, given everything else he’d done in that part of town.
Land Concern is still doing some of its most iconic work in San Juan Capistrano and across South Orange County, and a lot of that traces straight back to what Mike started there.
Around here, and to most people who knew him, he was Mikey. We miss him. We’re going to keep building Land Concern into the thing Mikey helped create.
