05/30/2026
I’m going to let you in on a little secret.
I didn’t buy this property because of the vineyard.
I bought it because of the house.
The wrap-around porch stopped me. Something about it pulled me back to growing up in Louisiana — to watching my mother work in her antique store, to porches that meant something, to houses that had lived long enough to have a point of view.
I grew up in a place steeped in history. I know what it feels like when a place is telling you something. I know when you are supposed to listen. This place was telling me to stay.
What we found when we looked closer was something we didn’t fully understand yet: one of the last remaining historical collections of 1800s-era buildings in Napa Valley was on this estate. A farmhouse. A schoolhouse believed to be the oldest in the valley. A long barn from the 1880s. A red barn that had partially collapsed — protected by a historic designation, which meant we couldn’t touch it until it fell, and then we had the honor of building it back exactly as it was. So we did.
Every restoration decision came from the same place: keep what’s real. The floors became walls. The walls became ceilings. The original hardware stayed. The iron work stayed. We opened up windows and let the mountain back in.
The vineyard, it turned out, was just as abandoned as the buildings. Heritage Cabernet planted in 1985, left to its own devices, no inputs, no attention — vines that had been finding their own way for forty years. That’s organic farming in its purest form. We didn’t rip them out. We brought them back into balance with what’s new, the same way we did with every building on this property. And we found quality we could never have imagined.
Restore, don’t replace. That’s the only philosophy that made sense here.
It started with a porch that reminded me of home. — Kisha Itkin, CEO
