Napa Valley’s wine country style owes a lot to AD100 Hall of Fame architect Howard Backen, who died on July 22 in Napa Valley with his wife, Ann Ernish-Backen, by his side. He was 88 years old.
Backen, the co-founding partner of California-based firm Backen and Backen – Architecture | Lifestyle | Wellbeing, designed more than 60 wineries in his lifetime, and his pared-back, nature-inspired aesthetic became a signature of the architectural typology in the state’s most prestigious wine region. Always tying the architecture back to the land itself, Backen’s designs use natural materials to form sweeping interior volumes that borrow views from their surroundings. In addition to wineries, he applied this strategy to the large swath of hospitality, residential, and retail projects he completed over his six decades of architectural practice.
Though Backen’s work is most closely associated with California, his original roots are further east. Backen was born in Montana in 1936 and soon after, moved to rural Oregon, where he later enrolled in the University of Oregon’s bachelor of architecture program in Eugene. After graduating in 1962, he relocated to San Francisco, drawn by its creative counterculture spirit of the time, and worked for local architecture firm Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons and then, architects Warren Callister and Romaldo Giurgola. After four years, Backen and two of his architecture school peers, Robert Arrigoni and Bruce Ross, decided to go into business together, founding the San Francisco–based studio BAR Architects and Interiors. There, Backen designed high-profile projects including Disney Studios in Burbank, California; Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in Park City, Utah; George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch near San Francisco; and other private residences for prominent personalities including real estate developer and wine mogul H. William “Bill” Harlan. The trio grew their firm to employ more than 100 people.
In 1994, Backen and his former wife, interior designer Lori O’Kane, moved to Napa when the architect was commissioned to design a winery for Harlan. With the lure of better weather and nature in their immediate backyard, they decided to put down roots there. In 1996, Backen left BAR Architects and Interiors to establish Backen & Gillam Architects, a new studio in Napa in partnership with fellow architect James Gillam. He purchased a home on a five-acre hillside property and designed an entirely new house atop the hill with sweeping views of the valley. In 2021, Backen and his current wife Ann Ernish-Backen moved to Montecito; the architect cited their increasingly frequent fire evacuations as the cause.
Through his firm, which was renamed Backen and Backen when Gillam departed and Ernish-Backen became a founding partner, the architect cemented his personal philosophy. His practice is built around the idea of regenerative design, uniting land, body, and building through framed views, environmentally conscious systems, and context-centered architecture. In a Backen project, rustic materials are exposed and celebrated, not hidden behind sleeker facades, and building forms often take inspiration from traditional farm structures. Where clients are on board to steward them, regenerative landscapes or farmland are encouraged on site.