Margrit Mondavi, widow of famed vintner Robert Mondavi, makes a fresh start in a modern, two-bedroom home.
Margrit Mondavicalls her home
"The Ruin" because that is what it looked like to her the first time
she saw it.
From 'Ruin' to Redo
Margit Mondavi, the owner, left little
more than the footprint and exterior walls of the original home in tact.
It
was 2009 and Mrs. Mondavi's husband, famed vintner Robert Mondavi, had died the
year before. After 25 years of living in a storied Napa Valley estate, in an
11,500-square-foot home best known for the swimming pool in its living room,
she was ready to downsize.
The
Ruin was the first house her real-estate agent showed her. Mrs. Mondavi recalls
the 3,000-square-foot, four-bedroom, five-bathroom house as being dark, with a
roof that leaked and walls that blocked the views. That was before she looked
at 25 other listings, which she describes as "horrors"; she decided
to return to the Ruin a second time. On her third visit, she brought along
friend and architect Howard Backen to ask his opinion of the house and 9 acres
that sit off a narrow, winding road on a hillside overlooking the Napa Valley.
"He
said 'Take it, I'll do it, you'll never get a view like that,' " she
remembers. And so she took it, on the condition that Mr. Backen, whose clients
have included Robert Redford, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steve
Jobs and numerous Napa wineries, would design the house.
That isn't exactly how Mr. Backen
remembers it.
"Margrit
said, 'Can you make this beautiful?' and I said, 'You can make anything
beautiful, but—' and she turned to the real-estate lady and said, 'I'll take it
because he can make it beautiful.' I had a 'but' there, but she cut me off. I
didn't finish the sentence and then I was committed," he says.
Mr. Backen can now elaborate on his
"but": The windows were wrong. The space was too broken up. There was
no connection between the house and the view or the outdoor space. Mrs. Mondavi
wanted a pool off of her bedroom, but that meant building it 15 feet off the
ground.
Mrs. Mondavi, 87, remained, as she
usually is, undaunted and determined, so Mr. Backen started sketching. A year
later, nearly all that remained of the original house were the exterior walls,
the footprint, a Chinese pistache tree and the name.
Originally
from Switzerland, Mrs. Mondavi met her future husband in 1967 while working as
a tour guide at the winery that he founded in 1966 and turned into an iconic
brand. She went on to become director of public relations, starting programs
such as the winery's summer music festival, which has brought artists like Ella
Fitzgerald and Harry Belafonte to Napa.
Mr.
and Mrs. Mondavi were married for 28 years and beyond the winery—which Constellation Brands acquired in 2004—were
well-known philanthropists, donating $35 million to the University of
California at Davis to establish the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the
Performing Arts and the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science.
Their Wappo Hill home was known as a place that brought together a who's who of
wine, food and art.
Wappo
Hill, which was originally asking $25 million, sold for an undisclosed amount
in 2011 to Jean-Charles Boisset, proprietor of Boisset Family Estates, which
owns a collection of wineries in France and California, and his wife, Gina
Gallo, a winemaker at her family's E. & J. Gallo Winery. Mr. Boisset says
they weren't just attracted to the architecture of the Cliff May-designed home,
but also the property's history, energy and location.
Mrs.
Mondavi declines to say what she paid for her home or how much she spent on the
renovation. Agi Smith, a real-estate agent with Pacific Union
International-Christie's International Real Estate, who saw the property before
it was redone, says a home like this would go for at least $4.5 million.
Nearby, a 5,000-square-foot home on 5½ acres with a pool is listed for $6
million.
If Mrs. Mondavi was ready to
downsize, it doesn't mean she was ready to slow down. She starts each day with
a 50-minute workout in the solar-heated, salt water infinity pool just off the
master bedroom, as she had envisioned. She still regularly goes to her office
at the winery some 35 minutes away in her convertible.
With two bedrooms and 2½ baths, the
modern, one-level house has been kept simple. The floor is a neutral
travertine. The walls and ceilings are Backen White (Mr. Backen's personal
formula, which he describes as a "warm white"). The entrance hall
disappeared to enlarge the living room.
Mr.
Backen eliminated as many walls as possible. On the west side of the house,
facing the view of the valley, he added walls of glass doors out onto the
terrace. On the east side of the house, glass doors open onto the garden.
To create a connection between
indoors and out, landscape designer Claudia Schmidt and Mr. Backen created a
"Zen garden" off the dining room, which includes a seating area and a
dining area on a raised terrace. The Chinese pistache tree shades the area from
the sun and Ms. Schmidt added a small fountain. It is now a favorite spot of
Mrs. Mondavi's and is easily accessible from the kitchen, where she spends much
of her time.
Ms. Schmidt also created the
"laundry garden." The house came with a clothesline that Mrs. Mondavi
wanted to keep (she uses it), but Ms. Schmidt surrounded it with Mrs. Mondavi's
cutting and vegetable garden. Mrs. Mondavi chose the cutting roses. As with the
interiors, Ms. Schmidt describes the palette of the garden as "subtle and
calming" with shades of gray, green, white, purple and blue throughout.
Mrs. Mondavi replaced the lawn
surrounding the entrance with gravel and olive trees. Nestled there are 90
stone mushrooms, eight to 12 inches tall, made by a local artist. She gave them
to her husband for his 90th birthday. "What are you going to give a man
who has everything?" she asks.
For the interiors, Mrs. Mondavi
brought in Thomas Bartlett, a designer in Napa who has known her for more than
40 years and advised on her previous home. They used much of the furniture from
that home, including the living room sofas that Mrs. Mondavi had made up 18
years ago in heavy, cream colored cotton. "She had virtually everything
and I spent a number of days pushing and pulling until everything felt
right," says Mr. Bartlett.
Echoing the home's neutral palette
of fabrics, Mrs. Mondavi's closet also tends toward muted colors. "I don't
look good anymore in prints. I wear black, brown, navy. Color ages you."
Inside
the house, the neutral background serves as a gallery for works by Picasso,
Giacometti, Diebenkorn, Frankenthaler, Tamayo, Oliveira and Mrs. Mondavi's
friend Wayne Thiebaud. There are also oil lamps from Jerusalem, betel-nut boxes
from Myanmar and masks from Africa. There are Russian icons, Roman glass and
antiques from Laos and Morocco.
The
heart of the home is the kitchen, where Mrs. Mondavi likes to paint so she can
hear her soups cooking. She stands at the marble counter with her brushes, her
watercolors and a large pad of watercolor paper. She used to do oils, but grew
tired of carrying around all the accouterments that go with oil painting. Her
dog, Luce, a Bichon Frise who has only one eye after an unfortunate run-in with
a bigger dog, sleeps in a flower-shaped bed at the end of the counter.
Between the dining room and garage
is one of Mrs. Mondavi's favorite rooms—the storage room. On one side are more
paintings and on the other are shelves filled with everything from cookbooks to
a silver cup from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong marking the 1997
handover of Hong Kong to China.
Mrs.
Mondavi recently returned from her granddaughter's wedding in London and a
train trip in Switzerland. Last Saturday she was barely off the plane from
Europe when she went to the winery to introduce Bruce Hornsby & The
Noisemakers as part of the summer concert series. And though she moved into the
house in 2011, Mrs. Mondavi says she's still not done organizing her home
office and she has decided to add a painting studio.
Article and Photos Sourced From the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324879504578599883415543360.html#slide/9
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