January 18, 2026One of the most destructive wildfires in California history, the Atlas Fire burned for 19 days in the fall of 2017, tearing through Napa Valley and destroying almost 800 homes before it was contained. Among these was an elegant Mediterranean-style residence perched on a volcanic hilltop affording panoramic views of the vineyards and the undulating landscape beyond. Its owners narrowly escaped, saving only their dogs and jewelry. On their return when the flames had fully subsided, all they found was their stone-clad wine cellar.
But these homeowners — a can-do couple who had relocated to California from New Orleans after losing their home there to Hurricane Katrina — were experts at starting over. They had known exactly what they wanted when they built the home in 2010: a house with a villa-like exterior and modern, dressy interiors. So, they figured, “Why not do it again?”
They called on their original San Francisco–based creative team, architect Richard Beard and interior designer Paul Wiseman, of the Wiseman Group, to faithfully re-create their 12,000-square-foot residence.
That meant the same golden stucco exterior, Italian-terracotta-tiled roof and trellised loggia, plus an updated iteration of the glamorous furnishings within. “They were so happy with the first house, they just wanted to get it back,” Beard recalls.
Once construction wrapped, in 2020, Wiseman collaborated with the wife, whom he describes as “elegant, with a taste for fancy,” on reassembling the furnishings she had cherished. Working with his firm’s longtime design director, Brenda Mickel, Wiseman sourced the same high-style contemporary furniture, lighting, and art whenever possible.
But he also introduced a sophisticated range of European antiques and vintage treasures, creating a mélange he describes as “pretty eclectic with an Art Deco hint.” His “relationship with the clients was stronger this second time around,” he says. “So, I felt comfortable challenging them on their old concepts and nudging the house forward. The fires also pushed them toward collecting more elevated art, and that process is still ongoing.”
Today, the redone house impresses right from its soaring entry, whose floor and staircase are clad in a pale limestone. Here, Wiseman placed a slender 1940s rosewood cabinet by Paolo BuFFa below an early-20th-century silver-leafed Japanese screen from the original decor, which survived the fire because it was in the wine cave. A five-foot-diameter, 24-arm Murano-glass chandelier by Barovier Toso tempers the double-height space.
The living room, meanwhile, is a study in comfortable elegance. Apart from a lipstick-red tentacled glass pendant sculpture by Dale Chihuly and colorful custom-made resin-topped tables inspired by irreplaceable Maison Jansen versions that were destroyed, the hues in this room, as in the rest of the house, are muted. “She likes any color as long as it’s beige or chocolate,” Wiseman says, teasingly, about his client.
A pair of back-to-back white sofas by Patrick Naggar and lounge chairs by Jean de Merry anchor the expansive space, whose fireplace is flanked by macassar-ebony-framed mirrors found on 1stDibs. A large-scale photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge by Richard Misrach, one of many artists who obligingly reproduced works the couple lost in the fire, is back in its rightful place, above the mantel.
In a corner of the room, high-backed lounge chairs from Bourgeois Boheme sit beneath a series of striking abstracts by the late British artist Stephen Gilbert. A custom mahogany secretary sheathed in lambskin holds ancient Nishapur ceramics.
“There’s a European sensibility,” Wiseman says of the design scheme. “It has a formality to it, but it’s modern. We were not trying to be ‘ye olde rustic Napa.’ ”
The dining room, in fact, has more in common with Europe in its Deco heyday than old or contemporary California. A tiered Venini chandelier composed of shard-like polygonal pieces of Murano glass shimmers above a walnut dining table and shapely Madeline Stuart chairs. Nearby, a pair of unusual convex chrome lamps by Steve Chase from the 1980s perch atop a 1930s black-lacquer sideboard by De Coene Frères under a group of charming 19th-century paintings by Lockwood de Forest depicting moonlight. (“It cost a fortune to procure another collection of these nine pieces,” Wiseman confides.)
The space can be closed off from the family room beyond with acres of creamy linen curtains that hang from the ceiling. “She loves curtains, sheers and overdrapery, the whole thing,” Wiseman says of the client. “The house has a lot of fabric — when the wind blows it’s so romantic.”
Indeed, a romantic mood pervades many of the spaces, from the silvery primary bedroom, outfitted with lounge chairs by LiaIgre and Patrick Naggar, to the wife’s dressing room, illuminated with a celestial platinum-leaf chandelier. Fortuny ceiling fixtures, fashioned from silk and Murano-glass beads, glow in the fanciful powder room and adjoining vestibule, where Wiseman designed a metal inlay to create a subtle geometric pattern in the limestone floor.
A more masculine look characterizes the husband’s cozy, walnut-paneled office. Here, the floor is sheathed in an Edelman leather, and antique Austrian technical drawings hang above a wood-and-metal desk by Napa designer Richard Von Saal. Spanning the fireplace mantel is a Fabiano Speziari lamp in the form of a huge pencil emblazoned with the message “Are you sure?” “They have a sense of humor and like things that are fun and have whimsy,” Wiseman explains.
Humor aside, crafting this home as a near replica of the original was a labor of love for everyone involved. “I think it was an emotional healing for them,” Wiseman says. “It was so traumatic losing everything. Rebuilding it regrounded them.”
