New book showcases Wine Country architecture, design

There was a time not so long ago when the Northern California Wine Country loved playing architectural masquerade.

Homes and wineries were dressed up to mimic France, Tuscany or some dreamy Mediterranean destination of indeterminate location. The vast vineyards, dry mountains and fields of lavender easily could be re-imagined as faraway places. Wineries became attractions to transport visitors to another time and place, from a 19th century German mansion on the Rhine (Beringer) to ancient Persepolis in the Persian Empire (Dariyoush) to the Cape Dutch style of South Africa (Chimney Rock).

But something interesting has been happening in the last decade. California has started to reclaim its architectural and design identity, one that represents the unique “terroir” of the Golden State.

“There has been so much great design over the past 10 years in particular, and it’s really evolved to an approach that springs from the land,” said Chase Reynolds Ewald, co-author of a new book, “At Home in the Wine Country” (Gibbs Smith).

The book is a visual home and garden tour through some of the best examples of contemporary architecture and design in the region. Each of the 17 homes and four accessory structures featured reflect an authentic sense of place, not just of California, but distinctively of Wine Country, too. Moreover, said Ewald and co-author Heather Sandy Hebert, they are designed to suit the unique characteristics of the site on which they are built.

The pair, experienced writers on architecture and design, focused primarily on Napa and Sonoma, with a few homes in the Carmel Valley. Seven of the homes are on this side of the Mayacamas Mountains.

As keen observers of shifting tastes and trends over the years, they note that design among the vines has been changing to a reflect a “defined sense of place, and not having to be someplace else,” as Hebert put it.

It’s that flowering of a local design ethos that the pair sought to highlight.

“A mission-style home is referencing California architecture, whereas Tuscan or French chateaux do not,” Hebert said. “It doesn’t mean we don’t think they’re pretty, but that is not the story we are telling.”

Sense of restraint

The story Hebert and Ewald are telling is of homes that reflect Wine Country’s “unique blending of agriculture and sophistication,” a look which runs the gamut from “modern farmhouse to refined rustic to updated agrarian to unapologetically modern.”

One characteristic these houses share, Ewald said, is a sense of restraint.

“It’s not about overbuilding or building a McMansion but being thoughtful and intentional about how to interact with these pristine sites in such beautiful places that are irreplaceable,” she said.

That means not overreaching with design, not wasting materials, using drought-resistant plants, offering on-site water catchment and storage, building in passive solar features and using other ways of “living more lightly on the land,” as the late Bay Area landscape designer and Sea Ranch visionary Lawrence Halprin said.

“Siting is another important thing, obviously for the views” Hebert said. “But also taking advantage of slopes for passive heating and cooling and to be less visible from the valley floor. If you’re on the hillside, you want to save the views for everyone else.”

Natural light

What does that look like, design-wise? Bigger windows, for one. Windows that become doors and doors that do double duty as windows. It’s all about letting the natural beauty of the landscape take center stage, rather than the architecture.

Interior designers, said Ewald, are taking a cue, selecting natural and understated materials, tones and accents.

“When you have great scenery, interior designers are prone to have not too much indoors that competes with the view,” Ewald said. “A lot of these homes have great art, but there’s a restraint about it as well. There are no loud colors or furnishings. They have these calm, fairly neutral. Nothing is too precious. Things are beautiful and often handmade and special, but people want to live in their homes and not feel their children can’t come in and their dog can’t come in and they can’t be free to put their feet on the coffee table.”

It is, they said, a “bespoke” style, with a respect for local artisans, fabricators and materials.

“That definitely is a common theme,” Hebert said. “These homes are designed for their comfort, their sense of ease and place in the community and not to impress. They may impress, but that is not their reason for being, which makes them even more wonderful.”

Of Napa and Sonoma counties, Sonoma has the greater geographic diversity and expansiveness and a wider variety of microclimates and vegetation. That is what is driving and defining residential design, the authors said.

Uniquely Sonoma County

However, some of the projects in the book do represent the Sonoma zeitgeist.

One is a weekend retreat in Sonoma designed by architect Andrew Mann and landscape designer Christa Moné that features an outdoor dining pavilion made of western red cedar and concrete floors. Terraces with neat raised beds of vegetables and herbs lead up to a covered patio surrounded by redwoods that serves as a center for family meals and entertaining. It is all about Northern California living: farm-to-table cooking and casual outdoor dining and entertaining.

Another project the authors love, located in the Russian River Valley, is one they call “Sunrise Pavilion.” Designed by San Francisco architect Jonathan Feldman, it was essentially an unfinished project when he took it on. There was only a modernist cabin and pool without a main house.

“The owners are passionate about gardening and growing their own food,” Ewald said. “They found this property where there was a guesthouse but no main house. Everything was there with a perfect site for a house.”

Working with the architect, the owners, design aficionados, came up with a home that would not clash with the existing cottage. The lines were clean and simple and contemporary, with minimal detail and furnishings. The front opens to the view, while the private master bedroom opens into a Zen-like hillside garden. The color palette is white with natural grays worked into the stucco and poured-in-place concrete, with Douglas fir paneling and upstairs wood flooring to warm things up.

A completely different project, more rustic but no less sophisticated, is a “Woodland Farmhouse” in the Valley of the Moon that used indigenous Sonoma fieldstone, board-and-batten siding and hand-trowled stucco. It is the dream home of designer Rossi Scott and her husband Angus, and it replaced a 1950s home built on stilts on the property studded with hundreds of live oaks. The modest farmhouse reminds Scott of her home in the Scottish borderlands.

The authors also highlight a highly stylized home in the city of Sonoma called The Black Box, designed by George Bevan and dramatically colored black.

“It’s strikingly contemporary,” Herbert said. One would guess that such a house would stand out. But not so.

“I asked the architect, ‘Why black?’ And he said because that is the color of shadows in between the trees. It does somewhat disappear.”

The house is a series of glass boxes trimmed in wood. Working with Mike Lucas of Lucas & Lucas Landscape Architecture, Bevan deconstructed the house into a series of boxes tucked into the hillside and linked by gravel pathways. So while it is a combined 6,000 square feet, the smaller structures break up the scale.

The book marks the coming of a new era of design that is environmentally sensitive and in tune with the culture and landscape of Wine Country. Ewald and Hebert, who live in Marin County, said there is so much good residential design in the region now that they could easily compile a book a year.

“California has an immense amount of talent equal to the task of building in these really special, really beautiful places,” Ewald said, "and creatively building with restraint and thoughtfulness and respect for the land.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com. OnTwitter @megmcconahey.