Behind a gated entry off Redwood Hill Road in Santa Rosa, 26 acres of Sonoma County open into one of the more thoughtfully composed estates we’ve had the privilege of building. Redwood Hill Ranch — designed by George Bevan of Bevan & Associates, with interior direction from the Four Seasons Design Team, and built by Shook & Waller — was completed in October 2020 and recognized that December as a North Bay Business Journal Top Real Estate Project.
Awards are nice. But what makes a project like this worth talking about, several years on, isn’t the recognition. It’s what the work itself reveals about how a wine country estate at this scale actually comes together — and what choices, made early and held to over many months, produce a home that still reads as inevitable when you walk through it.
Here’s a closer look.
Twenty-six acres in Santa Rosa, equidistant from Healdsburg and Calistoga, with room to plant a vineyard and build a future car barn. Sites like this one are increasingly rare in the North Bay, and the temptation with that much land is to overbuild — to fill the space rather than respond to it.
The choice here went the other way. The main house sits on a single level, a deliberate decision that lets the building defer to the land rather than compete with it. A private courtyard, a covered loggia, and an expansive parking court extend the architecture into the landscape without dominating it. The future vineyard and car barn were planned for but not forced, leaving the property room to evolve.
That kind of restraint is harder than it looks. On a site this large, every square foot of unbuilt land has to be intentional.
Bevan’s design reads as contemporary Spanish-Mediterranean — a style with deep California roots that asks for real discipline to execute well. Done poorly, it becomes pastiche. Done well, it feels both rooted and current, which is what was achieved here.
The 5,000-square-foot main home holds four bedroom suites, five and a half bathrooms, a media room, and a custom-designed gourmet kitchen, organized around a 1,200-square-foot great room. Two gas fireplaces anchor the interior. Above the three-car garage sits a detached guest house — a quiet, often-overlooked move that gives multi-generational families and extended visits the right amount of together-and-apart.
Single-level living at this scale is structurally and architecturally harder than stacking floors. The horizontal footprint demands more from the site, the roof, and the mechanical systems, and asks the architect to resolve every elevation cleanly. The payoff is a home that ages with its owners and reads as one continuous, breathing space.
In wine country, the line between inside and outside is the line most homes get wrong. The exterior program here was designed as a full extension of the living space rather than as an amenity package bolted onto it.
A custom outdoor kitchen. Covered and heated patios for the months when North Bay evenings turn cool. An outdoor fireplace. An inground pool with built-in spa and cover. An outdoor shower. A bocce court. Each element earns its place because it gets used — not because the brochure called for it.
The covered loggia in particular does quiet structural work, mediating between the architecture of the main house and the openness of the courtyard. It’s the kind of element that doesn’t photograph as the hero shot but defines daily life in the home more than the great room does.
Estates at this level are team sports. The named players on Redwood Hill Ranch:
Architecture: George Bevan, Bevan & Associates
Interior Design Consultants: Four Seasons Design Team
General Contractor: Shook & Waller Construction
Engineering: Enertia
We’ve worked alongside George Bevan and the Four Seasons Design Team on enough projects now to know what the collaboration produces. Bevan designs homes that hold up under close inspection — the moments where two materials meet, where a ceiling steps, where a door reveals a courtyard. That kind of work demands a builder who notices the same details. The Four Seasons team, working in interiors, completes the loop. When all three disciplines are aligned from schematic design forward, the project moves with a kind of quiet efficiency that’s hard to describe and impossible to fake.
If there’s a thesis hidden in Redwood Hill Ranch, it’s this: a 26-acre estate is not 26 times harder than a small home, but it is fundamentally different. The questions multiply. Where does the driveway land? Where does the main house sit relative to the future vineyard? How do you build for a property that’s meant to evolve over decades rather than be finished in a year?
The answer, every time, is to assemble the right team early and to hold the line on quality through every phase. Estates at this scale punish shortcuts. They reward patience, restraint, and the kind of craft decisions that take longer in the moment but produce a home that still feels right ten and twenty years on.
Redwood Hill Ranch was listed at $6.75 million when it came to market. The number reflects the land, the program, the team, and the work. It also reflects something less quantifiable — the confidence, when you walk a property like this, that every decision was the considered one.
We don’t build many homes a year. The ones we do build, we build alongside owners who care about the difference between a good house and a quietly extraordinary one. If that’s the conversation you’re starting to have, we’re always happy to be part of it.