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Designer Ken Fulk tore down the property’s garage and replaced it with this combined storehouse/tasting room. Twenty-foot doors connect the room to an enclosed courtyard, and Fulk tied the building’s history to its current purpose by skinning the far wall with authentic adobe bricks and hanging foraged manzanita branches that are echoed in his custom-designed light fixture. The wine racks and farm table are antiques, and Fulk designed the leather klismos-style chairs to have a volume that could stand up to the scale of the room.
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The adobe’s dining room is now a tasting room with casement windows and doors (a 1940s addition Fulk extended throughout the building) that look out onto the compound’s gardens. He replaced machine-made terra-cotta floors with handmade Mexican tiles and created an altar on one wall to showcase archaeological finds from the mid-1800s that turned up during the renovation.
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The adobe’s reception area (a former bedroom) showcases the project’s emphasis on organic materials and craftsmanship. "We went a little wild with cowhide in this room," says Fulk, referring to the brindle rug and antique metal-and-hide wingback chairs, but their impact is tempered by the sculptural vintage Italian light fixture and table, as well as the handpainted walls done by Rafael Arana, an artist on Fulk’s staff.
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One of the 1940s additions to the adobe was this wood kitchen, which Fulk says came coated in "a hundred layers of paint." To give it a more rustic feel, he asked his contractor to strip the wood bare and extended the terra-cotta flooring he’d installed in the main house. Historic renderings of the adobe hang on the wall, and their red mats are echoed in the oxblood red used on the kitchen counter bases. Rush-and-metal Varenne Paille chairs from Casamidy enlist classic materials in a contemporary design, a bridging of old and new that Fulk repeats throughout the compound.
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The adobe’s living room is now a lounge, with midcentury orange swivel chairs and an antique Khotan rug clustered in front of a custom blackened-steel fireplace surround. Cast-resin desert tortoise shells and antique Mexican pendant lamps anchor the room in its locale.
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Fulk tore down a one-room cottage to make this office for the winery manager. Rafters of hand-hewn timber line the high ceiling, leaving sizable wall space for the dramatic graphics of Fornasetti’s Nuvolette wallpaper and Blue Racecar, a painting on riveted sheet metal that was made by a Belgian art collective and found by Fulk in San Francisco’s Coup d’Etat gallery. The project-wide palette of leather, wood, and metal is reinforced here with the cerused-oak Dos Gallos screw table, cowhide rug, and Selle dining chairs in tubular iron and orange saddle leather from Casamidy.
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The back wall of the office faces the garden, and Fulk took advantage of its expanse to have Rafael Arana paint a mural of historical references, including a portrait of Captain Salvador Vallejo, who constructed the original adobe in 1842. Roses planted in vintage feed buckets flank the garden gate, a steel frame with oak inset.
