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A St. Helena couple overlays a modern palette on an Italian
villa to create a comfortable, contemporary ambience
It has become something of a cliché. California wine
country residents vacation in
Tuscany, fall in love with the irregular rooflines and warm colors
of the villages, and come home to build their own version in
Northern California’s Mediterranean climate. The wine valleys
are speckled with pseudo-Tuscan villas, some bearing old roof
tiles shipped from Italy, others painted in eye-catching shades
of ochre and terra-cotta that will need years of weather before
they begin to fade into the landscape.
Jean-Marie and John Kelly, owners of a large parcel of land
in the hills west of
St. Helena, also went to Italy and returned enchanted by that
country’s village architecture. In building their paraphrase
of Italian country style, however, they skipped the more obvious
clichés and kitsch. Although the shapes of their residential
complex certainly hearken back to Europe, an elegant palette
of materials and refined details pay homage to the essentially
Californian aesthetic of architects like Bernard Maybeck and
William Turnbull.
The Kellys’ residence is perched on a narrow bench of land
between sloping vineyards and a deep, thickly wooded ravine.
Hardly more than three miles away, people are shopping for shoes
and inspecting menus on St. Helena’s busy Main Street,
but the Kellys inhabit a different world, where hawks float in
the silent air and there isn’t another house in sight.
Besides their buildings, the only sign of civilization is the
neatly tended rows of merlot grapes that wind around the curving
hillsides.
Working with John’s nephew Brendan Kelly
and his wife Kerry Morgan, both architects, the Kellys conjured
up buildings that embody the strength and tranquility of the
setting. At first glance, the main part of the complex seems
to be a single structure, but
it is actually an assemblage of three units.
The first thing that grabs the eye is the four-story tower,
as sturdy and imposing as a medieval fortress. From a ground-level
wine-tasting room, a spiral staircase leads up to Jean-Marie’s
painting studio, then to John’s office and, at the very
top, to an open-air sleeping porch. Breathtaking views of the
vineyards and the hillsides can be seen from each level.
The master bedroom and bath occupy the one-story
building next door. From their private aerie, the Kellys walk
down a few steps to a wide, trellis-shaded portico that runs
along a rectangular building containing the kitchen, dining
room, and library. A couple of hundred feet away, a guesthouse
has two bedrooms, a sitting room/kitchen, and a
low-ceilinged attic designed as a grandchildren’s play
area.
Brendan Kelly and Kerry Morgan brought everything together
by using a remarkably limited palette of materials. Every
floor, inside and out, is either polished gray concrete
or wood. Every wall, inside and out, is a warm gray stucco.
The consistency of materials redefines the familiar term
indoor/outdoor, erasing the boundary between interior and
exterior textures. The stucco walls are interrupted by
panels of redwood that reference the traditional look of
sea air–weathered California barns. “I
knew there was a way to abstract the Northern California barn
buildings without relying on the historicism of Spanish and Italian
architecture,” Brendan explains.
Although the individual rooms aren’t large they have an
elegant grandeur, thanks to high ceilings, towering redwood-framed
windows, and French doors. The expanses of glass are divided
into tall rectangles with shallow transom windows at the top.
The tall windows are protected from the searing Napa sun by the
trellis, and the transoms can be opened to produce a constant
flow of air.
Everything has been designed to emphasize the purity
of the materials. In the kitchen, the venting is merely
slots in the redwood ceiling without the discordant note
of a metal grate. John didn’t
want to look down from his office to a roof punctuated by what
Brendan refers to as “the usual suburban armature” of
metal vents and pipes. These functionalities are hidden, leaving
only unmarred planes of cedar shingles.
For all the austerity of the materials, the Kelly
residence feels neither cold nor industrial, thanks
to Jean-Marie’s artistic
sensitivity and hands-on involvement. “She’s the
ideal client,” Brendan says affectionately. “To get
the right color for the stucco, she added local dirt to the mixes
until she got just the right color. Only when she had it just
right did she give it to the plasterer.”
She also walked into the vineyards and picked
grapes when it came time to choose paint for
the kitchen cabinets. The hazy blue, she points
out, is the exact color of a fully ripe merlot
grape at harvest time.
Family antiques, many in honeyed shades of oak, are scattered
throughout the rooms. In the bathroom, sterling
silver sink fixtures have a warm glow to contrast with
the honed concrete counters. In summer, the French doors
swing open, and the house functions perfectly as an indoor-outdoor
living space. In winter, Jean-Marie unrolls some
antique Oriental rugs on the concrete floor and closes the
transoms to add coziness. On
a clear night, the lights of St. Helena twinkle companionably
in the distance.
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