Hall &Bartley architecture
| west
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by Rachel Goldberg
When you open a bottle of wine, do you think about the intensive processing facilities that were involved in making it? How the grapes were grown and transported, crushed, processed and stored? Andy Hall does. As a founding principal of design firm Hall & Bartley, Hall has spent more than 25 years designing more than 50 wineries in California’s premium wine country, and he can say with certainty that there’s a lot more to wineries than tasting rooms. Hall was working with Scott Bartley at a firm that specialized in winery design in the early 1980s when its owner decided to retire and offered them the company.
They stuck with winery projects and since then they have become the goto firm for wineries looking to build or expand. The small practice has downsized in recent years with economic troubles hitting the wine industry. Hall says that while sales of lower-priced bulk wines remain strong, sales of higher-priced wines have fallen flat over the past few years. With winery finances squeezed, Hall and Bartley are doing more and more work with existing facilities rather than new construction. “We’ll evaluate the existing facility and see if we can make it more efficient in its use of how the product flows through it
and then come up with expansion ideas,” Hall said. “We do a master plan for them and then phase that plan over a number of years. Each phase is studied; with determination of work with associated production levels and costs. The client then has valuable information to incorporate into a business plan.” For Meridian winery, a large facility in San Luis Obispo County, Calif., Hall & Bartley created a master plan and 1. Sun setting on the hospitality center at St. Francis Vineyards, Kenwood, Sanoma County, Calif. Photo by Tim Maloney. 2. A public wine tasting facility at St. Francis Vineyards, Kenwood, Sanoma County, Calif. Photo by Tim Maloney. Summer 2010 41