Location: Pope Valley, California

Client:  Robert Radovan and Bill Criswell

Johnson Fain prepared design guidelines for the Aetna-Luciana Preserve, a residential and golf resort to be built on the site of the historic Aetna Springs Resort, originally built in the 1870s. The Aetna-Luciana Preserve will offer world-class residences in the beautiful agricultural landscape of world-renowned Napa Valley wine country. 

The design guidelines protect the unusually high quality of the natural and built landscape at Aetna-Luciana Preserve.  It sets standards for all new home-site development—buildings, building additions, services, site work, and landscaping—as a guide for home-site owners (and their design teams) in maintaining the extraordinary physical environment.  The collective result of applying these guidelines will be an ongoing and future Aetna-Luciana Preserve as beautiful in a hundred years as it is today.

The stewardship of history, culture, and the land is a central theme at Aetna-Luciana—one whose aim is maintaining the rural setting and lifestyle for which the area has become well-known.  The guidelines are crafted to be clear in their attitude about careful siting, responsive buildings, and harmonious landscapes without mandating strict adherence to a single architectural style, in order to maintain a timeless quality of place.

The guidelines establish the premium importance on the natural environment, and guide residences, related buildings, and site improvements to be beautifully designed and crafted but remain deferential to the agrarian landscape and natural surroundings. 

The guidelines include an overview of the visions and values for the Aetna-Luciana Preserve, annotated maps of major categorical zones and important general site conditions, parcel/home-site guidelines and maps, and lays out the protocol for the design review process.