Napa Valley architect Howard Backen, whose rustic refinement defined the Wine Country look, dies

If there was one architect who came to define the contemporary California Wine Country look of rustic elegance, it was Howard Backen.

Backen died July 22 in Napa Valley, where he established his firm Backen & Gillam with James Gillam in 1996. He was 88.

He left his distinctively natural imprint on buildings all over Napa and Sonoma counties and beyond.

His architecture respected and reflected the farmland of Northern California with structures that eased into the landscape, wherever that happened to be, mindful not to upstage Mother Nature.

This style earned him a reputation as one of the state’s leading architects and a spot in Architectural Digest’s AD 100 Hall of Fame.

“Howard is considered a blessing to the Napa Valley and Northern California. He created the local style — never flashy, always easy on the land, and pleasing to the eye,” San Francisco-based design lecturer and writer Diane Doranns-Saeks wrote of Backen in her online magazine “The Style Saloniste” in 2013. “His materials — stone, timber, concrete — enhance the landscape and live well with the rugged trees of the region.”

For nearly 30 years, Backen & Gillam — and now Backen & Backen — was the go-to firm in the Wine Country, designing 60 wineries and counting some of the region’s most high-profile labels like Harlan Estate in Oakville, Ram’s Gate and Cliff Lede, among its clients.

The company also designed 300 luxury homes, many for celebrities, seven resorts including the luxury Meadowood in Napa Valley and 40 restaurants.

Backen’s work and his reputation, though, was not confined to Wine Country. The Los Angeles compound Backen designed for actors Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis made the cover of Architectural Digest in June 2021.

Despite being known for a look others would come to emulate, Backen took his cues from the land.

“I am often asked what style I favor, and my answer is always the same. I promised myself early on I would not have a ‘style,’” he told The Montecito Journal in Santa Barbara County in 2021. “I tend to design what is given. The site, the land, the clients’ wishes, carbon footprint, and avoid being a bad neighbor. I would not design a palapa for Montecito, as I did for a property in Mexico. Nor would I place a barn in Mexico, but I did in Napa Valley.”

Carrying on her late husband’s legacy, Ann Backen, Backen’s wife and partner, will continue to head up the firm with former principals and now partners John Taft, Tony Selko and Tom Spoja.

“We lived a beautiful life immersed in the principles of design, nature, and well-being, I was humbled at his openness to learn from both me and others at our firm in the arena of wellness and its direct application to design, choice of materials, as well as new systems that respect the land and human health,“ she said in a statement released by the company. ”Fiercely competitive with me, from ping-pong to work, Howard and I were able to transform our competitiveness into oneness. We invested in our togetherness, when one went up or down, the other did too, co-captains of the same team with a common vision and deep love for each other. “

Actor Diane Keaton, who sought out Backen for a project, wrote the forward to “From the Land: Backen, Gillam, Kroeger Architects,” a coffee-table book profiling the firm’s most distinctive projects. She recalled Backen as “Western, big-boned and charming” and not one for small talk as they tooled around The Harlan compound, Ovid Winery and The Witt Estate Winery in her Range Rover.

“There, I saw porches and drip chains and jaw-dropping views and gables and courtyards and large foldaway walls; I saw linking breezeways, whitewashed surfaces and vineyards that made me feel the landscape instead of being distanced by it,” she wrote.

Backen’s attraction to the rural vernacular was rooted in his upbringing. Born in Montana in 1936, he grew up in Roseburg, Oregon, where barns were a common sight in the landscape.

“There’s a certain scale of a barn sitting in a field that’s magnificent — it creates drama in the landscape,“ he told The Montecito Journal. Many of his designs evoke but don’t imitate barns and other rural structures.

Backen, who knew from a young age he wanted to be an architect, earned a degree in architecture from the University of Oregon in 1962, coming away with the belief that every structure should be a product of its environment.

According to his biography, “From the Land,” he launched his career in San Francisco, with the firm Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons.

William Wurster was a leading Bay Area architect and founder of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. Backen mined their archives, studying their projects as they reflected The First Bay Area Tradition that flourished from the 1880s to early 1920s with architects like Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan.

It was a design ethos that related buildings to nature and used locally sourced materials such as redwood.

After short stints with Bay Area modernist Warren Callister and in New York with Romaldo Giurgola, Backen teamed up with college friends Bob Arrigoni and Bruce Ross and for 35 years took on major projects like Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in Utah, Disney’s Burbank Sound Studios, George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in Marin County and the headquarters for San Francisco’s Delancey Street Foundation, which earned the Urban Land Institute's Award of Excellence in 1992.

Backen, who believed the site and building were of equal importance, liked to hand-draw ideas while sitting at the site, taking inspiration from the land.

He also did numerous projects in Sonoma County, including the MacMurray Ranch and Paul Hobbs Winery.

In more recent years, he teamed up with wife Ann, becoming Backen & Backen.

“We will always be pushing forward, and not rest on our past accomplishments,” she said in a news release. “I was personally and equally Howard’s biggest supporter and reliable critic. I had a deep love for him; we worked side by side to ensure that he had a thriving practice. When I saw what needed attention, I jumped on it, allowing Howard to focus, with legendary stamina on his beloved craft.”

Backen and his firms received numerous awards over the years including, Hospitality Design Magazine’s Best “Green” Design and the Presidential Award for Design Excellence. Howard Backen also received the Ellis F. Lawrence Medal, the highest alumni award from the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts and was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, the highest membership honor conferred by the organization.

Only 3% of architects are honored as AIA fellows.

In addition to his wife, Backen is survived by three children and two stepchildren.

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com. OnTwitter @megmcconahey.