SINGLE THREAD FARM
SingleThread is a hospitality experience grounded in agriculture — a Michelin- recognized restaurant, inn, and farm whose identity is inseparable from the land that feeds it. Our task is to give that identity a built form that does not announce itself, but that frames everything around it: the orchard rows, the seasonal light, the slow rhythm of the working farm.
The architecture is conceived as a sequence of low concrete and slate volumes set within the existing tree canopy. Walls become thresholds. Glass dissolves the boundary between interior and field. Water — referencing the irrigation channels of the working farm — runs as a quiet line through the composition. The result is a place that feels less designed than discovered.
Among the rows
The site sits at 2836 Dry Creek Road in Healdsburg, Sonoma County — a working agricultural lot bordered by vineyards and orchards, with a creek tracing its eastern edge. The brief calls for hospitality programming on a parcel that remains, by area, overwhelmingly agricultural.
“To build a place that disappears into the orchard, and reveals it.”
Settle in an orchard
Buildings are sited within the existing tree canopy rather than adjacent to it. Heights are kept low. The orchard remains the dominant figure; the architecture is the ground.
A single horizontal line
A continuous slate datum — wall, water, walkway — threads the program together east to west, registering the geometry of the farm rows and choreographing the guest sequence.
Frame, don't enclose
Concrete portals and full-height glass treat each room as an open frame onto the landscape. Privacy is achieved through walls of slate stone rather than through interior depth.
A circular clearing.
The welcome pavilion takes the form of a low circular roof carried on a perimeter of slim columns — at once a shaded clearing and a public room. Its geometry contrasts the orthogonal field of the residence, signaling the change from arrival into hospitality.
F U N C T I O N Reception, retreat lounge, gallery
F O R M Circular roof, glazed perimeter
R O L E Civic counterpoint to the orthogonal residence
SIZE
8.000 sf
COMPLETION
Design Development
ROLE
Principal Architect / Interior Designer
Quiet,
on every side.
Each guest room is conceived as a self-contained pavilion, rotated to capture a private orchard view. Slate walls provide acoustic and visual separation between rooms; full-height glazing and operable doors place every guest in direct contact with the landscape
KEYS Five guest pavilions
AREA ±525 square feet each
ORIENTATION Each unique to its courtyard
Materials, a lifetime of weathering.
Cast concrete
Cast-in-place walls and lintels carry the structure and register the grain of the formwork — a quiet record of how the building was made.
Stacked slate
Locally sourced slate cladding gives the volumes their dark, geological mass. The horizontal coursing echoes the rows of the farm.
Glass & steel
Full-height glazing in slim steel frames dissolves the boundary between room and orchard, letting the architecture defer to the landscape.
