Architect Frank Gehry, the man who put Bilbao, Spain back on the map with his bold and controversial design for the Guggenheim Museum there, will soon leave his mark on the Napa Valley. Craig and Kathryn Hall have hired Gehry to do an extensive redesign of their Hall Winery outside St. Helena.

The museum, which opened in 1997, is widely credited with helping the revival of the center of Bilbao, which has quickly established itself as one of Spain's most cutting-edge cities with the Gehry-designed museum as the city's emblem.

Napa is hardly in need of a revival. According to some sources, as many as 4 million tourists visited Napa in 2005, and most wineries have imposed tasting charges in order to discourage visitors who would otherwise view Napa as a free bar.

Craig Hall, a Dallas real estate investor, and Kathryn Hall, former ambassador to Austria who grew up in a California ranching family, bought the old Napa Valley Cooperative Winery on Highway 29, just south of St. Helena, in 2003. In July of 2004, they filed an application with the County Planning Commission to re-do the property. The initial plan met with resistance from neighbors, who feared the Gehry design would act as a magnet, luring even more day-trippers to the already crowded valley.

Rather than digging in and insisting on doing it their way, the Halls took time out and started talking to the critics. "We talked to every major organization in Napa. We also spoke to the neighbors and listened to what they liked or didn't like about the plans, and incorporated those ideas into the revised design," Craig Hall told Wines & Vines.

"We wanted to make them comfortable as our neighbors. Our idea was not to just win approval, but to do it in a way that would create a lasting community relationship," he said. The Halls made major changes in the redesign in line with comments from neighbors and other Napa groups, including a complete redesign of the barrel storage area and changing the grade of a planned vineyard.
 
The outreach program worked. In April 2005, a new plan was filed with the county, which was under review until it was approved in January of this year by a vote of 5-0.

The old winery was not in the best of condition when the Halls bought it. A Hall spokesperson described the existing facility as "rundown and unsightly." However, it was a key part of the winemaking history of Napa, and there were several historic buildings on the property. From the beginning, the Halls' goal was to combine the character of the historic buildings and winemaking techniques with modern architecture and state-of-the-art technology.

The obvious question is, why Frank Gehry? Among his other major designs is the Festival Disney entertainment complex at Disneyland Europe, north of Paris. Critics of wine tourism have called Napa "Disneyland North" for several years. Gehry has worked on some winery projects. According to Craig Hall, he designed a winery in Canada that has not yet been built, and worked on the Marques Riscal winery project in Rioja, Spain.

"He is not doing the functional winemaking parts of the winery," Hall said. St. Helena architect Jon Lail is designing the working winery. "The main reason we went to Gehry is that he brings a sense of creative architecture to Napa. The challenge to him was to do that while respecting and fitting into the culture and historic roots of Napa."

There is an original 1885 stone winery, buried inside a 1911 warehouse building, that the Halls were particularly interested in restoring. Part of the challenge for the Gehry architects was to find a way to incorporate the old winery into the modern design. What they came up with was a kind of courtyard concept, with the modern Gehry design surrounding the historic building, a reverse of the I.M. Pei redesign of the Louvre Museum in Paris, where the modern part is surrounded by the historic section.

"The overall design is nothing at all like the Bilbao museum," Hall said. "It has an undulating look, low and trellised, almost a vineyard-like format."

Specific designs by Gehry will include a visitors' center for wine tasting, retail sales, hospitality events and offices, and a 3,000-square-foot building for grape reception.

Hall said that the multiple elements of the design did make it more complicated, especially the combination of historic and modern. "We don't expect to be finished until 2009 or maybe 2010," he said.

"Our goal is for the winery to be as energy self-sufficient as possible. We are going to use solar and glass especially designed to be energy efficient," Hall said. The remodeled winery will be gravity flow and take grapes from six different Napa vineyards and a vineyard in the Alexander Valley of Sonoma County.

The Halls began buying vineyard land in Napa in 1995, and now own 562 acres of vines in Napa and Sonoma. They already have a Napa winery in the Rutherford district. The Rutherford winery is geared to small-batch production and experimental lots. Wines there are almost entirely estate wines. That winery opened in March of 2005 with the Vienna Boys' Choir providing opening day music.

Finally, the question everyone has been waiting for: How much is the Gehry redesign going to cost when all is completed? Hall laughed, "I wish I knew. My best guess is we will be in for at least $70 million."

Whatever the cost, it appears that in the end, the Halls will have a first class winery and happy neighbors--a winning combination.