Finding Summit House
A designer's story.
I was born and raised in Napa Valley, and I’d spent my life thinking I knew every corner of it. In 2018, I drove up a mountain road I’d somehow never taken before, and near the summit, I found a place I didn’t know existed.
It sat tucked inside an ancient redwood grove on Mount Veeder — one of Napa’s most storied mountain AVAs — three A-frames joined together and planted there in 1969. Most people who had walked through before me, I think, saw a teardown. I didn’t. I saw craftsmanship you can’t replicate anymore. Wood chosen for character, not price. Beams set by hands that knew what they were doing. Sharp triangular peaks softened by unexpected curves — a rounded stairway, gently bent walls, a sunken circular conversation pit, and at the heart of the home, a fireplace built from ancient river rock pulled straight from the land around it. Geometry that still held a point of view.
For more than fifty years, this place had stood among redwoods that had been standing a thousand years longer. It had survived because it was built right the first time — and you can’t buy bones like those.
A Space That Chose Me Back
Something happened the first time I walked through it that I wasn’t expecting. I felt a piece of myself I hadn’t realized was missing quietly return. It happened the first time, and it happened every time after.
How had I lived my whole life in this valley and never known this place existed? I still can’t answer that. But once I found it, I couldn’t stop coming back. I’d drive up, walk through the empty rooms, and leave with the shape of the house still in my head. Days would pass and I’d find a reason to return. I’d stand on the deck under the redwoods and feel a quiet sense that the place was asking something of me — and I already knew what it was.
Recognition, Not Reinvention
Eventually I stopped resisting.
By then I had renovated a handful of homes — my own, projects in partnership, work for clients who trusted my eye. Enough to know I had a gift for this: for seeing what a space wants to become, for listening to the energy of a space before deciding what to do with it. But this wasn’t another project. It was a calling. A space that chose me back.
What became clear pretty quickly was that the house didn’t need to be transformed. It needed to be recognized. The love was already there — in the pitch of three roofs, the weight of the beams, the river rock built into the hearth, the curve of the conversation pit, the redwoods standing watch, the way the mountain held it all. More than a few people told me to tear the fireplace out, or at least paint over the stone. I refused. You don’t cover over something the land itself gave you. Nothing needed to be reinvented. It just needed someone to see it, honor it, and give it the life it had been waiting for.
That has been my work ever since.
What You Feel When You Walk In
Every decision — every material, every surface, every quiet consideration of how morning light hits the cedar at six a.m. — has been an answer to what the house was already asking for. I didn’t design Summit House onto this mountain. I listened, and built what was already there.
That’s what you feel when you walk in. The warmth isn’t decorative. The quiet isn’t staged. And maybe — if you stay long enough, under the redwoods, above the valley I thought I knew — you’ll feel a piece of yourself come back, too.
Summit House is a private residence at the summit of Mount Veeder, Napa Valley. Monthly residencies begin at 31 nights.