Hilltop fantasy

<p>The Mackie-Ecker home next to Annadel State Park has a pool area surrounded by native plants and deer-resistant grasses.</p><p>It all started on a terrace in Italy, on one of those fine days when everything is so sublimely perfect you’re tempted to toss out your old life and move to the Old World.</p><p>In that moment 20 years ago, John Mackie and Kate Ecker were halfway serious.</p><p>“We were taking cooking classes and thinking, ‘Oh, we have to live in Italy.’ But it didn’t seem practical after the next morning,” Mackie says with a chuckle.</p><p>As a management consultant specializing in strategic marketing, Ecker might have been able to swing it. But as an attorney, Mackie knew he couldn’t transfer his legal practice overseas.</p><p>So the couple did the next best thing. They moved to Sonoma County.</p><p>Mackie convinced his law firm to start a food and wine practice, and it opened an office in the North Bay.</p><p>“Back then I had a fantasy we would have our little Italian villa out in the country with the vines and the pizza oven and the pool. The whole Wine Country thing. And I convinced Kate to move along with me,” Mackie remembers.</p><p>They established what amounts to their own little 13-acre hill town in Bennett Valley, complete with vineyard, a vegetable garden, the outdoor wood-fired oven and a little guest tower over the garage. Shades of San Gimignano.</p><p>It didn’t happen easily or overnight. But the pair does know how to make things happen. Mackie, who went on to become a partner in the law firm — Carle Mackie Power & Ross, specializing in, among other things, food and wine law — is a founding board member and president of the Sonoma County Food and Wine Center. He’s been a board member of the Wells Fargo Center, the Alliance for Contemporary Art, the Sonoma County Humane Society, the old Museum of Contemporary Art, the Rincon Valley Charter School and the Sonoma County Museum.</p><p>Ecker, a Harvard and Stanford alum, helped found the Bennett Valley Education Foundation and has been a trustee of Sonoma Academy. She was a member of the Community Foundation Sonoma County’s Friends Advisory Council before becoming the foundation’s director of development, a position she held for several years.</p><p>Just as both had to make it happen by moving their careers to the North Bay, they found themselves undertaking a massive makeover of a house with little — beyond it’s fantastic location — to recommend it.</p><p>“I called it a Motel 6 in the country,” Ecker says of “the little shack” they bought in 1991 when she was pregnant with their twins Clare and Julian, now seniors at Sonoma Academy. They also have a son Zander, 25.</p><p>The septic system proved problematic and the property at one point was red-tagged. It took a couple of years just to get their permits. They wound up tearing down most of the old house and rebuilding. The work was so extensive they were forced to move out for 10 months. But like all good remodeling stories, the ending was happy. The late Santa Rosa architect Dick Osborn came up with a design that remade the “motel” into a home that eases into Sonoma County’s rural landscape.</p><p>It sits on a ridge bordering Annadel State Park. Late in the year they enjoy the rosy golden alpenglow that illuminates the top of Bennett Mountain to the south; at least once every winter it is dusted in snow.</p><p>“We love to look out across the vines,” said Mackie, who grows a half-acre of zinfandel and petite syrah and bottles 50 to 60 cases a year for a field blend bottled under the Mackie Family label.</p><p>With batten-board walls and corrugated metal roof, the house evokes the agricultural buildings dotting the county’s meadows and hillsides. Inside, the house is reminiscent structurally of a milk barn — single-story, with a high pitched ceiling running down the center like the spine of a book. It manages to look both casual and sophisticated, a fresh and open space in which to entertain and display their collection of Sonoma County and California art — like the playful sculpture made of baling wire by Seth Minor on the mantle and the abstract imagery of painter Pia Stern on the wall.</p><p>‘‘Some of our kids say, ‘Oh my gosh. Your house is like a museum,’ ” Ecker says with a laugh. “But that is because we have a lot of color in the house and we have a lot of art in the house, and most people don’t.’”</p><p>The living room is a pale sage with vibrant accents like watermelon-red chairs. The dining room is saffron walled, with whimsical notes. Hanging from the ceiling between steel posts is a bright sculpture of a squid. In one corner sits a Barbara Wollner birdhouse — unoccupied, of course.</p><p>Within this uplifting atmosphere, the couple welcomes friends and loves to cook. Members of the regional Slow Food chapter and a gourmet eating group for 30 years, they frequently play host. Although the house is built with the outdoor life in mind, in winter they love to decorate for Christmas with ever-expanding collections of ornaments and antique lead soldiers. Mackie inherited the first soldiers from his father and each year the little army gets larger, with a troop strength numbering in the hundreds, and spread out on a console table like a parade, with the Queen of England’s coronation coach and horse leading the march.</p><p>Christmas Eve may see a spread of lasagna verde served up for friends, with a more formal prime rib served on china and linen for Christmas dinner.</p><p>But for the most part, life on their hilltop is decidedly informal and easygoing.</p><p>“There is a lot of little Italian villa fantasy here, of making the wine. And we have olive trees and we have olive oil and we cure the olives and we have fruit trees and we make jam. Someone once said we spend a great deal trying to live the life of an Italian peasant,” Mackie says with a twinkle.</p>