Celebrating the Senses

With each harvest, the history of winemaking in Napa Valley evolves, creating something new each year from the terroir—a bottled essence of time and place.  The design of this tasting room in downtown Napa is centered on the experience of enjoying wine in an environment that celebrates the senses.  Renovating and restoring a stately, historic building and shopfront to its earlier grandeur required scraping away a century of “improvements,” including dropped ceilings and boarded up openings to reveal the raw building with its dramatic high ceilings. The result captures and emulates the vintner’s art of blending the old and the new. The result is a space that breathes light deep into the building, while creating a theatrical presence on the street through a lively and distinctly modern use of authentic materials.

 

 

 

Vino Veritas

Essere Franco (meaning “being frank” or “being true” in Italian) is the founding vintner’s brand for the Mia Carta label, and for this label’s first location, the owners came to INTERSTICE for more than architecture.  The firm hosted the Essere Franco team to workshop from scratch their brand and identity for their first tasting room in Napa. Together with their sales and marketing team, board of directors, and investors, INTERSTICE developed graphics, stationary, logos, and signage alongside the architecture and interior material pallet for the wine tasting room.  All of the elements highlight placeness through an explicit connection to the label’s home in the Napa Valley. Mia Carta, which translates to “my map” in Italian, became the primary driver of the brand: the idea of being mapped or grounded in place is the theme for the venue’s larger role as a departure point for wine tours in the area. As such, a wall-scaled plan of the city of Napa forms a two-story wine wall of CNC-milled cabinetry spanning the length of the tasting room, both separating and organizing the individual program spaces. The wine wall acts as a focal point in the space, the functional three-dimensional wine shelfing creating a map of downtown Napa’s street grid complete with the Oxbow Market and Napa River.  A vintage retrofitted Piaggio food cart is parked in the tasting room, awaiting opportunities to distribute wine for tasting events throughout the valley.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Weaving Wine with History

Mia Carta’s tasting room is located in the heart of Napa at First and Coombs Streets in a century-old historic steel and masonry structure, the tallest in downtown when originally built in 1914 by The Native Sons of the Golden West’s Napa chapter. Created in 1875, the fraternal organization’s mission is preserving the state’s evolving history and is a part of a shrinking population of such communal fraternal orders, making the presence of the Napa Parlor #62 in the building a unique and esteemed neighbor for this project.

 

 

 

Urban Vineyard

Transparency and light provide an indoor-outdoor quality to the tasting room’s architectural expression.  The exterior façade is designed to fold away to allow the downtown activity into the room while simultaneously providing a mise-en-scène of the interior energy and craft of the space back onto the street.  The presence of authentic and visible materials—wood, steel, brick, and stone within, paired with solid cork light fixtures suspended from the ceiling—fuse the natural with the manmade, activating and engaging the senses.  Features and details including the stamped metal ceilings, massive live-edge communal tables, clearstory windows, and deep awnings invite passersby to come in, pull up a seat, and delight in a glass of some of Napa Valley’s finest vintages. By creating an intimate yet social patio atmosphere throughout the space, Mia Carta invites you to explore all of Napa in the comfort of a sensual space that you want to be a part of.

 

 

 

 

 

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