Then we pull up to the restaurant French Blue and meet Howard Backen.

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It occupies a very handsome building designed by architect Howard Backen, who has created a modern vernacular of Napa Valley rural buildings.

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If Robert Mondavi inspired the daydream of owning a winery, the architect Howard Backen was the man who crowned the dream and gave it material form.

FORBES: Napa Valley: The Entrepreneur's Tour

Most of the 85 rooms are in clean-lined, gray clapboard cottages--they appear to have been beamed in from the New England seacoast--designed by go-to winery architect Howard Backen.

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Its rustic-chic white-planked living room is vintage Howard Backen, the architect-designer who is to Napa Valley's now ubiquitous New England barn vernacular what Addison Mizner was to the South Florida hacienda.

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