Inside an Airy Sonoma Escape Nestled Into the Land

At a distance the property seems pretty much like a mirage: a pristine framework sitting atop rolling hills coated in wild grass, reminiscent of agricultural barns but a little bit much too geometrically specific. Closer inspection reveals two huge glass-and-metal hydraulic windows that carry to open the mild-stuffed inside to its surrounding spectacular landscape. As if this scene weren’t magical sufficient, two photograph-fantastic miniature donkeys round the corner to greet you, seeking for treats.

“They are Sugi and Jinx, our excellent loves,” Kristina O’Neal suggests with a chortle, referring to the complete-time people of this Sonoma County dwelling. O’Neal, a founding partner of award-winning design business AvroKO, recognized for groundbreaking hospitality assignments close to the entire world, and her partner, Adam Gordon, a developer of revolutionary actual estate assignments, are longtime Manhattanites who, a 10 years ago, sought out a piece of land where they could delight in a various relationship with the bodily entire world. “I imagine we generally want to return to sites in which we grew up, even if it’s just the sense of a location matching a romanticized memory,” suggests O’Neal, who is originally from the Bay Space. Gordon has his personal explanations for settling in wine nation: “I’d been stashing cars and trucks right here for ages—I’d fly in and generate the winding roads,” he confesses. So, possessing more than enough place to store a collection of beautifully restored vintage vehicles turned section of the equation when the couple commenced seeking for a location to construct.

Soon after an in depth search, the duo settled on a 227-acre plot in Knights Valley, a nonetheless rather-forgotten corner of Sonoma County. Owned by an aged San Francisco family who had made use of it for cattle ranching, it was just one of the final tracts that hadn’t been transformed to grapevines. Alternatively of developing as before long as they observed it, the couple camped there for the initially 12 months, divining the perfect site. “We agreed to encounter the land—the seasons, the smells and mild and the wildlife—before embarking,” Gordon points out. O’Neal provides, “We experienced been amassing pics of bare-bones constructions from Uruguay that felt the two agricultural and soulful.” This became the most important inspiration for the residence. The couple’s blended yrs of experience as designer and builder resulted in a steel-and-glass barn clad in stone that is equally embedded in the land and otherworldly. “A stripped-down, almost glass-walled tent of types,” states Gordon.

The household is outfitted with seemingly countless sliding glass doors, in addition to two airplane-hangar home windows that completely open up the residing area on just one close of the residence and the major bed room on the other to bring gentle breezes as effectively as sunlight into the dwelling on beautiful days—whicthis currently being Northern California after all, is virtually usually. “The residence is 28 ft extensive, so we are hardly ever far more than 14 toes from a window,” Gordon proudly states. The a lot of openings also allow their domesticated donkeys to roam freely, inside of and out. “They have the joint,” O’Neal states, only fifty percent-jokingly.