Thomas “Olle” Lundberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1954, two weeks after his parents emigrated from their native Sweden. He attended Washington and Lee University as an English major and then graduate school in architecture at the University of Virginia. He built his first project in Connecticut in 1984, a home he designed for his sister, where she still lives. In 1987, he started Lundberg Design in San Francisco, incorporating a metal fabrication shop into the architectural studio. In 1996, he purchased a 1933 mattress factory in the Dogpatch neighborhood and grew the firm to its current size of twenty employees. Olle, his wife, Mary, and their dog, Curly, live and work at the studio four days a week. The other three days are spent at their cabin on the Sonoma Coast, their favorite place in the world.