Meadowood: The Valley's Great Comeback

In the last days of September 2020, the Glass Fire came over the hills above St. Helena and took half of Meadowood with it. Forty-two guest rooms, the conference center, the kitchens, the tennis shop, and the three-Michelin-star Restaurant at Meadowood, gone in a matter of hours. For anyone who knew the valley, the loss felt personal. Meadowood was never just a resort. It was the room where Napa Valley talked to itself.

A club before it was a resort

Meadowood began in 1964 as a private country club, a quiet retreat in the woods above St. Helena. In 1979, H. William Harlan, who had fallen for Napa Valley as a college student two decades earlier, acquired the property with two partners. The land was not right for vines, Harlan decided. It was right for something rarer: a gathering place for the valley’s winegrowing community, and a destination for travelers who wanted the real Napa.

Harlan would go on to found Harlan Estate on an Oakville hillside, one of the valley’s most collected wines. But Meadowood stayed his first love. In 2001 the partners acquired the land at the resort’s entrance and founded The Napa Valley Reserve, a private members’ club built around the life of a great wine estate. The resort grew into a 250-acre wooded estate with cottages and lodges scattered through the oaks, a nine-hole golf course, five tennis courts, croquet lawns, and a spa set into the hillside.

Photography courtesy of Meadowood Napa Valley

The night everything changed

The Glass Fire destroyed roughly half the resort’s buildings and some fifty acres of its woodland. The Restaurant at Meadowood, where chef Christopher Kostow had held three Michelin stars, burned to its foundations. Kostow stayed with the project and kept cooking elsewhere in the valley while the rebuild was drawn up. There is still no announced timeline for the restaurant’s return, which tells you something about the ambition of what is being planned.

What came back first was the spirit of the place. The resort welcomed guests again with a reduced room count while construction continued around it: Forum for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the seasonal Terrace Café, the spa, the pools, the trails. The regulars returned anyway. They always do. Meadowood’s address book reads like a roll call of the valley itself, and loyalty like that is not built on thread counts.

Photography courtesy of Meadowood Napa Valley

That is Harlan’s saying, and the rebuild is its proof. Few properties get a second founding. Meadowood is getting one in public, with the whole valley watching.

Why the comeback matters

Napa Valley has no shortage of beautiful hotels. What it has only one of is Meadowood: the institution that belongs to the valley’s own community first and to visitors second. Its honors, membership in Relais & Châteaux, three Michelin Keys, a Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star rating, describe the service. They do not describe the feeling of the place, which is that you have been let in on something.

Photography courtesy of Meadowood Napa Valley

When the new Restaurant at Meadowood opens its doors, it will be an event the whole valley attends, in spirit if not in person. Until then, the resort is already worth the trip. The woods are still the woods, the light still does what it has always done, and the valley’s living room is open again.

Photography courtesy of Meadowood Napa Valley

Details verified September 2026. Photography courtesy of Meadowood Napa Valley.

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