Napa, California, USA
In the heart of California’s Napa Valley wine country, the Clos du Val winery lies on the Silverado Trail, the first permanent road that runs from Napa to Calistoga. Drawing inspiration from the history and legacy of the Clos du Val brand, the landscape architects refreshed the existing landscape to add another layer of sensorial character to the guest experience. The existing landscape was more evocative of a European garden than Northern California. The landscape architects expanded the winery’s outdoor tasting spaces and introduced a more ecologically appropriate plant palette.
Clos du Val Winery by Surfacedesign, won an 2025 International Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design.
With the vines as a backdrop, the design team’s intervention brings romance and identity to the outdoor spaces. From Napa’s iconic Silverado Trail, visitors are greeted with swathes of playful pink Muhly grass on either side of the entry gate, and a procession of cypress trees lines the entry road, interspersed with a palette of muted perennials that make a quiet impression.
A wetland planting area reactivates a small pond on the southern edge of the estate. The driveway meadow’s soft palette (with Karley Rose fountain grass, creeping rosemary, and purple verbena to name a few) extends to the tasting terraces in the Mediterranean garden areas, merging the hospitality spaces with the surrounding vineyards. The gardens bring a contrasting informality to the winery’s refined and bold architecture, elevating the overall tasting experience. To enjoy a glass of wine is to take the time to pause, see, smell, and taste. Clos du Val’s fragrant perennials – sweet salvias, soft lamb’s ears, tufted plumes of grasses – are layered in a composition that evokes depth and gentle movement with the soft color, fragrance, texture, and sounds of a natural meadow. Grounded in the site, the tasting gardens connect with views of the surrounding valley.
In a nod to the winery matriarch’s love of roses, hundreds of peach and pink roses skirt one of the tasting areas, characterizing the space with color and fragrance. A new path leads guests from the main hospitality buildings through a newly established pollinator meadow to an al fresco tasting pavilion. The vineyard terrace borrows views from the nearby hills. The resulting landscape is a part of the Clos du Val terroir – and it will only get better with time.
Clos du Val was part of the historic May 1976 blind winetasting, known as the Judgement of Paris, that rocked the French wine establishment and legitimized Napa winemaking. What began as an experiment to find the best terroir outside of France for winemaking in the 1971 by American backers John and Henrietta Goelet and French vinicultor Bernard Portet has become an award-winning winery in the historic Stags Leap District. The team considered areas in Australia and Chile, but ultimately settled on the “the southeastern portion of the upper valley, below Stag’s Leap, where the soils were deep and various, and the closer proximity of San Pablo Bay and the deep, frigid Pacific Ocean beyond it moderated the climate of southern-central Napa much as the Atlantic did that of Bordeaux.” Two generations later, the winery is still run by the Goelet family and produces some of the finest Cabernet Sauvignons in the region.
Architects: Surfacedesign, Inc.
Design Team: Roderick Wyllie, Annie Hansel, and Robert Andrade
General Contractor: Siteworks, Inc.
Client: Clos du Val Wine Co.
Photographers: Marion Brenner
