Description

The Dominus winery is situated in the Napa Valley, some 80 km north of San Francisco. After around ten years of work on this land the clients had managed to receive worldwide attention for their wines, and decided to build their own wine cellars on the site.

The design is not based on the courtyard layout of the wineries in the region, but proposes a long and simple building volume, which follows the direction of the rows of vines. The building is divided into three different areas: a space with large chrome steel tanks for the first fermentation of the wine, a Barrique cellar where the wine is being stored in oak barrels for two years, and a space for bottling and storage. These areas are aligned one after the other in the building volume, which is roughly 101 m long, 24 m wide and 9 m high. The main access to the winery crosses the building situated in the midst of the roughly 2 m tall vines; thus, the winery is integrated into the geometric, linear pattern of the vineyard.

The functional zones on the ground level are spread out, creating intermediate areas. The main access to the winery passes through the largest of these covered areas serving as an open public entrée where the accesses to most of the important spaces of the wine cellar converge. Here are located the accesses to the Barrique cellar and the wine-tasting room, the staircase leading to the offices and the roof terraces, the entrance to the wine cellar keeper’s rooms, as well as the large gates to the tank space. The wine-tasting room is public and the oak barrels in the cellar are visible through a glazed partition. The storage area, where cases of wine are stored, is situated at the southern end of the building.

The summer climate of the Napa Valley region is very hot during the day and very cold at night. The building envelope is made of stone to store the heat and protect from the cold, thus making the best use of the climatic particularities. The façade is made of gabions which are typically used for the construction of retaining walls and river-beds. Prefabricated meshes are joined to form baskets of two sizes and filled with basalt stones from the close-by American Canyon. They integrate into the landscape due to their dark green to black color. The density of the stone filling in the gabions varies according to function and requirements of the spaces behind, changing the degree of transparency of the walls. In some areas, they are dense and impenetrable, in other areas light seeps through to the inside during the day or artificial light seeps out at night. The gabions offer a kind of stone mesh with varying degrees of transparency and resemble a skin rather than a traditional stone wall. Mock- ups were built before works on site commenced in order to test the appearance of such a wall, to which degree it allows light and views to penetrate the building, and to explore the possibilities of construction.

Contrasting to the stone façade interior glass partitions were used by the architects for the office spaces. Hence, the monolithic appearance of the building when seen from a distance is gradually broken down as one is getting closer: from the partial transparency of the stone façade down to the lightness and brightness of the glazed interior partitions.

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Originally published in: Jürgen Adam, Katharina Hausmann, Frank Jüttner, Industrial Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.