Frog’s Leap

With three buildings in ten years, Ned Forrest and Frog’s Leap used classic shape and modern sensibility to unite the past and future.
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Ned’s vision of a “new old” vineyard estate on Mill Creek began with reviving the partially collapsed Red Barn into a winery, with fiasco barely skirted when fermentation tanks arrived just in time for the harvest. Next, the Barrel Chai brought all of Frog’s Leap’s organic, dry-farmed winemaking and storage home to Rutherford. Then, most ambitious, the Vineyard House became Napa’s first LEED certified private building, where guests are treated in the polished glow of old wood. As design draws on what’s come before and function looks forward, an abiding collaboration introduces history to the time ahead.

 

 

 

Rutherford, California
6,000 square feet

Ned Forrest Architects
Structural Design Group, Structural Engineer
Summit Engineering, Civil and Electrical Engineer
Leslie Whitelaw Interior Design

Owner John Williams

"They are extremely receptive to and interested in producing something that everyone is happy with, and they don’t feel right until that’s accomplished, and that’s fairly unusual. They respect the architects and the designers and that makes it a pleasure to work with them.”

— LESLIE WHITELAW, INTERIOR DESIGNER