January 18, 2018 By Hamish Bowles Vogue
Alexis Traina’s childhood vision of Napa’s famed wine country was shaped by the Friday evenings she spent glued to the television watching Falcon Crest.
“I was mesmerized by it,” Alexis remembers of the campy soap opera starring Ronald Reagan’s first wife, Jane Wyman, as the Machiavellian matriarch of a winemaking dynasty, and heartthrob Lorenzo Lamas as her playboy grandson. At the same time, after successful careers in television, radio, and newspapers, Alexis’s father, Clarke Swanson, who had been drawn to Napa since he first discovered it as a student at Stanford, decided to reinvent himself as a vintner: He and his wife, the flamboyant New Orleanian Elizabeth Pipes, bought a 100-acre parcel on the fecund Oakville Appalachian.
Unlike the screen version, as Alexis recalls, “the Napa of 1983 was not shiny, not glossy. It was just beautiful and supersleepy, a true agrarian society. All the wineries had tiny little tasting rooms—it was very simple, humble, and pure.” She grew to relish the “tapestry of wild, interwoven tribes of multigenerational families, as well as farmers and winemakers and chefs, all drawn together to create magic.” Alexis documents the valley she loves and its colorful denizens in her engaging new book, From Napa with Love: Who to Know, Where to Go & What Not to Miss.
Her mother, she says, made sure that “life was about celebrating the little ceremonies and rituals of the dinner table to the maximum. As children, we were expected to participate with gusto.” Chez the Swansons, gatherings generally ended with late-night tap dancing—the bohemian Mama Swanson raided Goodwill for interesting footwear to which she added taps so that all her guests could join in.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, Alexis’s future husband, start-up entrepreneur Trevor Traina, lived about a mile down the road, his parents having acquired and restored the farmhouse of the storied To Kalon vineyard, created in the late nineteenth century by H. W. Crabb (the original “Wine King”). For her and Trevor, she notes, “Napa was always a happy place we shared.”
After graduation, she went to work with her family, latterly as the creative director of the now-celebrated Swanson Vineyards. They were sold two years ago, but in the meantime, Trevor had sleuthed a rustic compound based around an honest-to-goodness Craftsman Sears kit house of the sort that sprang up all across America at the turn of the century. Its original clapboard water tower was shaded by an ancient oak, with a tack house and vegetable gardens running alongside a train track that carries the whistling Napa Valley Wine Train, a period-perfect collection of vintage Pullman cars. “Like my father,” says Alexis, “Trevor has an extraordinary nose for finding special places that other people aren’t sure what to do with. So many people had overlooked it, but we thought that it would be amazing for our kids and friends—a kind of glorified, grown-up camp living.”
The Trainas called on their old friend San Francisco decorating impresario Ken Fulk to transform the interiors. “We share a joie de vivre, a romantic idea about the world,” says the dapper Fulk, “and a wonderful sense of nostalgia.”
The trio first collaborated on “a long-suffering fishing camp,” a run-down hippie compound set dramatically over the Pacific on the cliffs of Inverness. The multitasking Fulk has also created parties for the Trainas, whose hospitality is legendary—witness the “Hirst Bar” he had designed in their turn-of-the-century manse in San Francisco’s mistiest heights (Vogue, December 2009). Built around a Damien Hirst Spot painting, the Art Deco–inspired Jacques Adnet bar has become “a little canoodling spot,” as Fulk notes, “a real connector and the envy of their neighborhood.” He also shares a passion for Napa, which he began exploring some 20 years ago when he first moved to California. Inspired by a landscape that reminded him of his native Virginia, he bought a dilapidated place there, and subsequently a hilltop farmstead that he playfully describes as “a gay Green Acres.”
For Fulk, the Trainas’ new compound had “a Petticoat Junction aspect—a folly that celebrated what we really love about Napa, and a way to hold on to something that could readily disappear.” They scoured antiques shops, fairs, and flea markets to furnish it. “Ken approaches design like an old theater director,” says Alexis, “and storytelling is a deep passion of the three of us.”
The kitchen, stacked with transferware plates, looks as though Mildred Pierce might bake a pie in it and Mr. Blandings had installed the rhododendron wallpaper in the living room or the quilts in the guest rooms. “The property was too good to be true, and it was just sitting there waiting for a family to enliven it again,” says Trevor. “What was not to love?”
The Traina children—Johnny, ten, and Delphina, nine—relish their rural idyll. “Napa has become such an integral place, not just for Trevor and Alexis but also for the next generation,” says Fulk. “The children swing in the tree and jump in the pool and ride their bikes, and I think it brings out that childlike sense of wonder in adults as well.”
The idyll was shaken less than a month after these pictures were taken when the Trainas were leaving a restaurant in Yountville to discover that the ridge encircling their valley was ablaze with “a curtain of bright orange flames that ran for miles. It was just horrifying.” They were witnessing California’s deadliest natural disaster since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. They gathered up their children and fled in the middle of the night. Their property was spared, “but we all knew many people between our two valleys who lost homes,” says Alexis.
In response, the Trainas moved swiftly with their neighboring friends to help establish the Napa & Sonoma Relief, in partnership with Tipping Point Community, to support the low-income neighborhoods hardest hit by the fires. A gala evening in early December raised nearly $4 million toward the effort.
“During those two weeks of fires, people from every corner of the Earth reached out,” says Alexis. “Everyone who has been moved by the indelible experience of Napa will always have a special attachment to this place.”