If there’s one architect who has outlined the fresh look of rustic elegance in California’s wine country, it’s Howard Backen.
Backen died on July 22 in Napa Valley, where he founded his company Backen
He has left his vegetative mark on buildings in Napa and Sonoma counties and beyond.
Their architecture was respectable and reflected the farmlands of Northern California with structures that blended into the landscape wherever they were, taking care to outshine Mother Nature.
This taste earned him a reputation as one of the state’s leading architects and a place in Architectural Digest’s AD 100 Hall of Fame.
“Howard is considered a blessing to Napa Valley and Northern California. It created the local taste: never flashy, comfortable in the countryside, and pleasing to the eye,” Diane Doranns-Saeks, San Francisco-based speaker and design writer. , he wrote about Backen in his online magazine “The Style Saloniste” in 2013. Its fabrics (stone, wood, concrete) decorate the landscape and combine well with the steep trees of the region.
For almost 30 years, Backen
The company has also designed three hundred luxury homes, many of them for celebrities, seven resorts, including the sumptuous Meadowood in Napa Valley, and 40 restaurants.
However, Backen’s paintings and reputation were not limited to Wine Country. The Los Angeles complex that Backen designed for actors Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis was featured on the cover of Architectural Digest in June 2021.
Although known for his look that others would come to imitate, Backen encouraged on the field.
“Sometimes they ask me what flavor I prefer and my answer is the same. I promised myself from the beginning that I wouldn’t have any ‘taste,'” she told the Montecito Journal in Santa Barbara County in 2021. “I tend to design what I’m given. The site, the terrain, the clients’ wishes, the carbon footprint and avoiding being a bad neighbor. I wouldn’t design a palapa for Montecito, like I did for an asset in Mexico. I wouldn’t put a barn in Mexico either, but I did in the Napa Valley.
Continuing the legacy of her late spouse, Ann Backen, Backen’s spouse and partner, will continue to lead the company with former directors and now partners John Taft, Tony Selko and Tom Spoja.
“We have lived a charming life immersed in the principles of design, nature and well-being. I was moved by his openness to learning from me and others in our company in the area of well-being and its direct application to design, material selection, as well as new ecological systems. the earth and human health,” he said in a statement released through the company. “Fiercely competitive with me, from ping pong to work, Howard and I were able to turn our competitiveness into unity. We invested in our unity, when one went up or down, the other did too, co-captains of the same team with a common vision and a deep love for each other. “
Actress Diane Keaton, who chose Backen for a project, wrote the foreword to “From the Land: Backen, Gillam, Kroeger Architects,” an engaging book outlining the firm’s most unique projects. He remembered Backen as “Western, difficult and charming” and someone to chat with as they drove through Harlan Resort, Ovid Winery and The Witt Estate Winery in their Range Rover.
“There I saw porches and drip chains and breathtaking views, gables and patios and wonderful retractable walls; I saw covered paths, whitewashed surfaces, and vineyards that made me feel the landscape as if I was far from it,” she wrote.
Backen’s charm for the rural vernacular is rooted in his upbringing. Born in Montana in 1936, he grew up in Roseburg, Oregon, where barns were a common sight on the landscape.
“There’s a barn of some length set in a box that’s beautiful — it creates drama in the landscape,” he told the Montecito Journal. Many of his designs evoke, but imitate, barns and other rural structures.
Backen, who knew from a young age that he aspired to be an architect, graduated in architecture from the University of Oregon in 1962, confident that each and every layout deserves to be a product of its environment.
According to his biography “From the Land”, he began his career in San Francisco, with the company of Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons.
William Wurster, one of the Bay Area’s most prominent architects and founder of UC Berkeley’s School of Environmental Design. Backen examined his archives and studied his projects because they reflected the early Bay Area culture that flourished from the 1880s to the early 1920s with architects such as Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan.
It’s a design philosophy that connected buildings to nature and used locally sourced fabrics, such as redwood.
After brief stints with Bay Area modernist Warren Callister and in New York with Romaldo Giurgola, Backen teamed up with schoolmates Bob Arrigoni and Bruce Ross and undertook primary projects for 35 years, including Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in Utah, Disney’s Burbank Sound Studios and George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, and the headquarters of San Francisco’s Delancey Street Foundation, which won the Urban Land Institute’s Award of Excellence in 1992.
Backen, who believed that he and construction were of equal importance, enjoyed drawing concepts by hand while sitting in the Array taking inspiration from the terrain.
He also finished projects in Sonoma County, adding MacMurray Ranch and Paul Hobbs Winery.
In recent years, he has partnered with his spouse Ann to Backen.
“We will move forward and will not rest on our achievements beyond,” he said in a news release. “I was personally and also Howard’s biggest advocate and trusted critic. I had a deep love for him; we have worked closely to make sure he has a thriving practice. When I saw what needed attention, I jumped on it, allowing Howard concentrate, with mythical stamina, on his beloved craft.
Backen and his corporations have won awards over the years, including Hospitality Design magazine’s Best “Green” Design Award and the Presidential Award for Design Excellence. Howard Backen also received the Ellis F. Lawrence Medal, the University’s highest alumni honor from the Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts, and has been named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, the organization’s highest honor.
Only 3% of architects are revered as AIA Fellows.
In addition to his wife, Backen is survived by three children and two stepchildren.
Editor Meg McConahey can be reached at 707-521-5204 or meg. mcconahey@pressdemocrat. com. On Twitter @megmcconahey.