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"View Slideshow\n\nIn a part of the world that bottles ornate ch\u00E2teaus and faux Palladios, the simple eloquence of the landscape can sometimes become an afterthought. But across a creek, past an incongruous red London phone booth situated at the juncture of vineyards, lies a Napa Valley alter ego: a modern-day California farmhouse, inspired by the region's vernacular heritage, that draws quiet power from its setting.\n\nAt first, the farmhouse on a hillside built and designed by the architect Howard J. Backen and his wife, Lori O'Kane Backen, seems slightly hallucinatory. Have the couple cornered the market on Windex? Or is it possible that what looks to be a huge, exceptionally clean window on the veranda is actually open to the elements, gloriously screenless, as if the residence were a frame and nature\u2014specifically, a view to the foothills of the Mayacamas Mountains and the Yountville appellation\u2014the portrait?\n\nA butterfly wafting into the residence on a breeze solves the mystery.\n\nIs it possible that what looks to be a huge, exceptionally clean window on the veranda is actually open to the elements?\n\n\"Lori and I wanted the same thing,\" says Backen\u2014based in St. Helena and Sausalito\u2014whose client list reads like a who's who of wine country. \"The idea of an American farmhouse was in our heads the minute we started and just stayed there.\"\n\nThe architect, who has designed numerous structures for Harlan Estate, Viansa and other wineries, knows the landscape intimately. When the couple first encountered the property, five sloping acres forested with poison oak, it was billed by realtors as \"non-view.\" Braving the thickets, the couple bushwhacked up the hill to behold astonishing painterly vistas that linger in the mind perhaps longer even than fine wine. \"The challenge was finding a way to do a farmhouse aesthetic on the side of a hill,\" he explains. \"Our original notion was a wraparound porch on flat land. But once we saw the view, it didn't make sense. The benefit is what you see out the window.\"\n\nBacken, who is of Norwegian descent, and his wife, an interior designer and Scandinavian by background, spent two years living on the property, getting to know its moods and whims. They learned how water behaved on the mountain, how the sun moved, where the storms came from, the intricate plays of light. On a hillside, light is the trickiest element of all. To capture it, Backen situated the residence with a slight counterclockwise turn, allowing the valley's Mediterranean light to infuse the rooms. The farmhouse's dimensions, too, were drawn from the landscape; the slope determined the width, while the length was measured by two existing live oaks. The setback of the veranda came from studying the sweep and patterns of rain. \"Though the residence is on a hill, it never feels like it is,\" says Backen, who has described his approach to design as \"architecture that lives happily with the land.\" \"Every room has the right sense of view.\"\n\nFighters of Napa Valley fabulousness, the couple looked to the rural vernacular, from Sweden to California, for inspiration, enlisting an unpretentious array of materials that included board-and-batten siding, local fieldstone and corrugated metal for the roofs. \"We had in mind an American farmhouse but with Scandinavian and French elements,\" Lori Backen says. \"We were after country living at its best, wherever it came from.\"\n\nDownstairs, the combined living area, dining area and kitchen opens onto the veranda, which the Backens leave au naturel, without screens or doors, in all but the most inclement weather. The now famous \"Backen doors,\" which operate with barn hardware and glide to and from pockets hidden in the walls to open, close or screen at will, give the whole residence the feeling of the most luxurious sleeping porch imaginable, set in a utopian landscape where bugs\u2014except yellow jackets around harvest season\u2014rarely dwell.\n\nThe second-floor master bedroom does a similarly intimate tango with the landscape. \"It's hard to leave this bedroom in the mornings,\" Lori Backen says. Adds her husband, \"I've traveled all around the world, and I've never been in a bedroom I like more. It's wonderful to be here in a storm, with the fireplace lit and the sound of rain on the metal roof.\"\n\nTo heighten the rural idyll, a series of fieldstone paths wind from the residence to an outdoor shower, housed in a trellislike structure with an open roof\u2014Howard Backen's favorite morning ritual\u2014and then meander down the hill to the poolhouse, designed to evoke humble sheds but nevertheless outfitted with a steam room, Tuscan grill and other daily essentials of the modern Napa Valley farmer.\n\nThe firm of Backen Gillam is shaping some of the wine country's most anticipated new establishments, including a resort in Kenwood being built by the owners of Auberge du Soleil, a restaurant for Dean DeLuca, and the Napa Valley Reserve, an exclusive viticultural club. In this rarefied milieu, restraint is often not the watchword. But the architect and his wife, who share the farmhouse with 10-year-old daughter Annie, were determined to keep the details simple, from the white paint evocative of Swedish farmhouses\u2014which lets paintings by California artists take center stage\u2014to the farm sink in the kitchen, left authentically unadorned.\n\nEven the chickens are included in the couple's vision of rural bliss. Past the poolhouse, the path leads to the wine country's chicest chicken coop\u2014an ingenious Backen creation in which eggs are laid in drawers that may be conveniently pulled from the outside for collection.\n\nIn perhaps the Napa Valley version of Girl Scout Cookies, Annie and a friend sell farm-fresh eggs door-to-door to neighbors and friends. Rainwater spills from the coop roof and elegantly snakes down a chain into an awaiting barrel. \"There's a social order here,\" explains the architect, clearly enchanted with the family's country life, including the coop's raucous inhabitants. \"This is a machine for living for chickens.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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