Bill Hocker | Jul 14, 2020

Update 9/17/20

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SH Star 9/17/20: St. Helena holds first public hearing on Farmstead hotel project

7/14/20

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The wine industry is now venturing into overnight accommodation after their success in becoming restauranteurs. A prime example is the movement of Ted Hall's Long Meadow Ranch, starting from grape growing to wine making to the Farmstead Restaurant and now to the proposed Farmstead Hotel. Mr. Hall is so far the exemplar developer in the Valley. Each effort to move into tourism has been conceived in an understated, locationally appropriate and environmentally sensitive way. No Tuscan Castles, French Palaces or Bunny Foo-Foo's to litter the landscape.

But no matter how well done, the Farmstead Hotel represents an acceleration of the massive tourism expansion that has already distorted normal life in Napa. Wine makers are getting into the hotel business.

Ted Hall's project is a sensitive attempt to accommodate community concern while still tapping into the conversion of his home from a wine making region into a tourist destination. The project site, when viewed in the aerial photo, a field notched into the urban fabric of the town, is not destined to remain a field for long. The visual, traffic and water impacts on the town would be barely different and perhaps less than the townhouses that would probably be built instead.

But it is right to push back on the unceasing expansion of the tourism industry that is destroying the rural small-town authenticity that used to be the county's claim to fame. This project deserves scrutiny, especially since it is an early example of an ominous new trend in the wine industry toward hotel development. The winery hotel being proposed by the other Halls and the Freemark Abbey Hotel are also in the vanguard. The continued development of such projects at the more than 500 wineries in the county, developed by less community-conscious entrepreneurs than Mr. Hall, will have far reaching consequences for the character of Napa County.

Documents
7/14/20 City Council meeting agenda and documents
7/12/20 George Caloyannidis Letter
Staff Agenda Report and Graphics

Articles
NVR 7/12/20: St. Helena seeks input on Farmstead hotel proposal
SH Star 4/29/20: St. Helena to negotiate with applicant on potential Farmstead hotel
SH Star 2/19/19: Farmstead owner plans new hotel in St. Helena
NVR 8/1715: St. Helena council praises Farmstead hotel plan

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