Nielsen : Schuh Designs an Elegant, Earthen Tasting Room for Oregon’s Rodeo Hills Winery

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The driveway to Rodeo Hills Winery winds through 7 acres of vineyard and into a new generation of Oregon wine history. Founder Jared Etzel named his winery after his childhood experience of bouncing on the nearby dirt roads in a VW van with his parents who, in the 1980s, helped pioneer the Willamette Valley’s now globally celebrated organically produced pinot noirs. Now Etzel’s new tasting room, designed by Nielsen : Schuh Architects, is the latest in a growing group of quietly sophisticated works of architecture in which to savor the region’s ever-more finely crafted wines.

Photo © Ethan Gordon

Rodeo Hills specializes in pinot noir and chardonnay grapes grown for what Etzel describes as a “ridiculously small” enterprise (annually producing only 800–900 cases). With the property on one of the valley’s highest hillsides, the lower temperatures, shallower Jory soil, and densely planted vines produce wines with high acidity, deep flavor, and low alcohol. The tasting room is a fitting vessel: an intimate 2,200-square-foot space entered through thick rammed-earth walls leading into a soaring room wrapped in delicate Douglas fir–framed glazing, nestled between the vines and a stand of native oaks.

“We like to emphasize the connection of architecture to the land,” says Amy Nielsen, one half of the Sonoma, California–based studio, alongside husband Richard Schuh. “The land was here first.”

Photos © Ethan Gordon

Despite rammed-earth’s typically low carbon footprint and temperature-steadying thermal mass—say nothing of its metaphorical fit with boutique winemakers’ obsession with terroir—only a handful of wineries across the world have used the technique. Etzel made the choice. “It spoke to me,” he says. “I liked the textural elements.”

Photo © Ethan Gordon

For Oregon’s first rammed-earth winery, Nielsen and Schuh set a high standard, imbuing ageless method with unusually refined aesthetic acuity. Like an ancient ruin, the earthen walls rise from 24-inch bases to 16-inch crowns. The architects specified alternating mixes of gravel with two cements—one gray, the other white—to create gently undulating striations in the walls that evoke the sedimentary layers of volcanic soil and sand the nearby vines are rooted in. Topped by a concrete binding beam, the walls slope at a 4:12 pitch to support the roof, which rises in two overlapping planes. Each plane sheds rain into two boldly articulated, V-shaped weathering-steel gutters that feed circular infiltration zones to recharge the otherwise irrigation-free site.

One enters the tasting room beneath a cantilevering corner of the roof. Beyond the wide, gatelike door, a hallway narrows with the slanting rammed earth on one side and darkly stained tongue-and-groove cedar on the other. The feeling is secretive, tomb-like, and, with upwardly sloping rammed-earth striations, a little vertiginous. From this spatial compression, the tasting room offers release, the ceiling rising to 18 feet atop four exposed-steel beams held aloft by V-shaped braces rising from rammed-earth pillars. Glazing wraps the space on three sides for an overall effect that blends a cozy living room with an outdoor proscenium stage: the vines are the actors, the valley and mountains beyond, the set.

Photos © Ethan Gordon

“We wanted the whole building to kind of grow, from the earth to the tip of the roof,” says Nielsen.

Though a rather bluntly cut door in the entry hall’s wood wall visually disrupts the cave-like effect, craftsmanship elsewhere abounds. Nielsen : Schuh, a two-person shop, produces its architecture from first sketches to construction administration. The contractor, Nielsen adds, “was very sporting” with their fussy articulation of the rammed earth. The soap-like smoothness of the tapered wall required forms crafted like cabinetry and elaborate external bracing. Lines drawn inside the forms guided the layers’ gentle undulations with each layer requiring careful, time-consuming compacting.

Etzel notes that when his parents started making wine in the mid-1980s, they were one of around 50 producers in Oregon. Now, there are around 1,000. Yet, “with consumption shrinking,” Etzel says, “there’s a lot of interest in expanding the architectural experience.”

Nielsen : Schuh’s work nicely wraps that expanded experience of savoring wine in a room. So, too, the bottles being savored: the duo also created Rodeo Hills’s label, inspired, Nielsen says, by the shape of the site.