Half Dose #40: Novelty Hill-Januik Winery

A couple weeks ago I featured The Boxwood Winery by Hugh Newell Jacobsen on my weekly page, the fifth of such a building type that I've featured. Boxwood and the four other projects are a varied mix that illustrates the relative freedom given architects for a fairly new building type that sits somewhere between the pastoral and the commercial.



The Novelty Hill-Januik Winery in Woodinville, Washington by Seattle's Mithun is another notable winery that balances building and landscape to "celebrate wine's agrarian roots."



The building itself is a balance of expansive, industrial concrete surfaces, soft woods and large glazed areas that make the winery an inviting location that doesn't gloss over its industrial context (the building sits between two railroad lines and just south of numerous large industrial buildings) or the industrial mechanisms that make large-scale winemaking possible.



Exposing the barrel room (image below) is but one way of acknowledging this industrial aspect of winemaking, a common gesture shared with other wineries that starts to make a connection between the glass of wine in the visitor's hand and the grape from whence it was made.



The architecture, structured via tilt-up concrete panels, illustrates an approach of using an industrial aesthetic while embracing landscape via extensive gardens and other open spaces. This is an appropriate, though not obvious, way of designing a winery, a building that typically sits in or adjacent to large areas devoted to growing the grapes that end up in that $20 bottle on your dinner table.



Links:

:: Novelty Hill Januik
:: Mithun