If Gary Friedman excels at one thing, it may well be executing the seemingly impossible. “Any new idea, any great idea, you’re going to have a thousand people tell you it can’t be done for every one person who might think it’s a good idea,” he tells me one afternoon in November, gesturing toward the Napa Valley sky. He’s talking specifically about the glass atrium of his newest restaurant—a glittering, 54-seat, full-service outpost in wine country—but the sentiment will hold true across most topics we discuss. “Nobody thought I could have 100-year-old olive trees work inside a restaurant, because to do that, you have to build bunkers in the ground with enough dirt and irrigation to keep them alive—and a glass roof so they get enough sunlight.”
The roof proved trickiest, unlikely to pass California’s stringent energy code. After more than a year of being told he’d have to settle for a much smaller skylight, Friedman had a revelation at a real estate conference in Las Vegas. He’d returned to his hotel to see the afternoon sun streaming, and noticed that the room wasn’t too hot. He looked outside; the building, and many of the hotels around it, were all made of glass. “This is a 110-degree day in Las Vegas, but somehow they’re not blowing up the electrical systems,” he recalls. He asked his team to chase down the glass manufacturers, he explains, as we sit under a canopy of his hard-won olive trees in an atrium built of the same slightly reflective glass that takes in sunlight without the heat.
I had flown out to Yountville—a picturesque vacation town with only 3,000 full-time residents, a vineyard-lined 10-minute drive from downtown Napa perhaps best known as the home of Thomas Keller’s renowned restaurant The French Laundry—where Friedman opened the newest RH outpost in October. A five-building enclave, RH Yountville is connected by boxwood-lined allées of decomposed granite and bounded by oversize roaring fireplaces that ward off the evening chill. Crystal chandeliers hang overhead, tucked amidst those olive trees—an arresting sight indoors. During the day, sunlight creates dappled shadows of foliage on the tabletops; at night, the space glows, alluring and romantic. “This couldn’t just be any restaurant,” says Friedman. “We had to do something extraordinary.” It’s another statement that I soon realize applies to much more than just this space.
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