Traditional Masonry Archives — From the Ground Up: Castello di Amorosa, Calistoga, Calif.

From the Ground Up: Castello di Amorosa, Calistoga, Calif.

Daryl Sattui has always had a passion for medieval architecture and an uncanny knack for making the improbable a reality.

Over the years, he’s developed a penchant for beautiful buildings — in particular, castles. He spent decades taking photographs, finding pictures, gathering plans, collecting books and just generally dreaming of castles … not in the sky, but on the ground.

And even though his construction skills were limited — “The only things I ever built were a chicken coop, a rabbit hutch and a dog house,” he says — he took all his savings, even liquidating his stock, and in 1994 began to build his heart’s desire: Castello di Amorosa, a castle in the Napa Valley region of California that’s home to the Castello di Amorosa Winery. The name in English means The Castle of Love. “I have a disease,” he confesses about his obsession. “I know it.”

Once upon a time

Over the years, the 66-year-old Sattui has traveled Europe extensively, spending most of his time in Italy, Austria and France. When he was younger, his idea of a perfect day was getting up at dawn, climbing onto a motorcycle with his handy hammer and tape measure in tow, and visiting vacant buildings he’d find scattered about the countryside. About 15 to 20 years ago, he says, they were everywhere.

“Sometimes I would break in, but I wouldn’t steal anything. I just took a lot of measurements and photographs,” he says, adding he was always thoughtful enough to replace any boards he had taken down. These excursions would often keep him out after dark. And although he welcomed company, he usually traveled solo. “For some strange reason,” he says with a laugh, “nobody would ever go with me twice.”

It was during one of these outings in Italy where a woman caught him trespassing on her winery property. Rather than shooing him away, she invited him to share a glass of wine or two. “She was in a good mood,” he says.

During the course of the visit, Sattui admired two newer buildings constructed in the “old style,” which the woman’s Danish husband had built. By trade, Lars Nimskov was a naval architect who designed cement ships, he learned. To Sattui, Nimskov seemed like the perfect candidate to help him build a castle in the United States. They met, they talked and, to make a long story short, a few months later Nimskov arrived in Calistoga, Calif.

“I wasn’t sure if he’d really show up,” Sattui says. But there he was — ready to break ground on a project that would keep him stateside for the next 10 years.

Although differences sent Nimskov pack­ing before the castle was completed, “I was smart enough to know he was good at what he did,” Sattui says of his former project manager. “Lars and I just didn’t get along.” Another builder out of Italy, Paolo Ardito, was hired to continue the work.

The first 10 years were spent building the expansive labyrinth that consists of underground cellars and caves, largely modeled after the 13th and 14th century Caves Patriarche Père Et Fils in Beaune, France. Sattui remembers some 20 years ago spending all day at the Patriarche, Burgundy’s most extensive cellars, poking around with a flashlight and making sketches until a guard threw him out. “That was part of my inspiration,” he says. “I want to go back and show that guy some of the rooms I patterned after that cellar.”

An Austrian named Fritz Gruber, who specializes in medieval-style wine cellars, helped Sattui with the underground part of the project by sending a crew to help Nimskov build the first two rooms. “He stayed for several weeks,” Sattui says. “His guys stayed for three months until Lars figured out how to do it.” Gruber subsequently also visited every year.

A Welsh mining auger was used to drill 900 feet horizontally into the hillside. Crews would drill 15 feet, gunite that area and repeat these steps until the caves were finished. The caves, naturally high in humidity, offer the perfect atmosphere for properly aging wine. They keep the barrels swollen, which makes for less evaporation. The temperature is a constant 58 or 59 degrees.

The castle, which is two-thirds underground, houses thousands of wine bottles and barrels in its two-acre barrel cellar. The main wine cellar, which contains 1,500 barrels, is the largest underground chamber, 135 feet long with 40 cross vaults. It took two and a half years and $2 million to build, Sattui says.



In addition to barrel storage, there are also a pit, a knight’s room and a torture chamber complete with an iron maiden, which looks like a mummy case with spikes, in the deep recesses of the castle below.

“I tried to build a fantasy, an expansive labyrinth that when you turn the corner, each new room would be a new adventure. There would be something there that you weren’t expecting,” Sattui says. “No two rooms are alike.”

And that’s some feat considering there are 107 rooms — a few of them secret — in the castle’s eight levels, four above ground and four below.

So far, the 121,000-square-foot castle has been under construction for 14 years. Crews ranging from 15 to 64 people from several different countries worked on the castle at any given time, depending on available funds. The castle opened up to the public in April 2007 for tours and wine tastings. Some work still continues.

Leave no stone unturned

“Architects and masons are in awe of the castle,” Sattui boasts. “Everyone is amazed by it. This is not Disneyland. It looks real because it is real.”

The brick came from Austria. Made by the royal brick maker of the Hapsburg Empire, some 850,000 bricks more than 200 years old were used to build the fortress. The stone was local, from Syar Industries Inc., in south Napa. “Year after year, as many as 17 guys at a time squared the stone,” Sattui says. “I tried and gave up. Basalt is hard to shape.” A single stone can take up to an hour and a half to shape.

Some of the stone and sandstone came from an old winery not too far from the castle. The church facade is made out of that stone. Some was carved into gargoyles, Sattui says.

On the stones and brick – and most everything a visitor can see – his laborers used mortar made the old-fashioned way, with lime, sand and water, not cement. To meet code, reinforced concrete was used on the innards of most of the walls. A hole had to be drilled in each brick and wired to the reinforced concrete to make the walls stable.

Despite the intrusion of new materials, Sattui says he insisted on authentic materials whenever possible. His crews were also taught to mimic the looks found in the extensive pictures he had collected over the years.

No detail too small

Sattui went to great lengths to create a medieval castle that is authentic down to the most minute, colorful details, from the hand-pounded chain links that hold the light fixtures and the horse-tie racks for tethering to escape tunnels and an outdoor bread oven. Nails were made by hand, as were doors and gates. Door shapes and sizes run the gamut: tall, short, narrow and wide, with arched tops, flat tops or wooden headers.

It took two Italian artists one and a half years to paint the huge frescoes in the great hall upstairs, which measures 72 feet by 30 feet with 22-foot-high coffered ceilings capped with gilding and beams. The fireplace from Tuscany is more than 500 years old.

Hand-hewn oversized beams bedeck the church’s ceiling. Frescoes adorn the walls, centuries-old wood covers the floors and a stone altar draws the eye front and center. Sattui hopes one day to be able to hold weddings there.

There’s a moat with a drawbridge, stables for horses and loggias for outdoor gatherings. There are five defensive towers with everything from battlements and banners to arrow loops and boiling-oil slots. There are apartments for nobles that will be available to rent for various occasions. Basically, everything you would find on the grounds of a castle of old, you’ll find at this newcomer in California.

Castles aren’t made in a day

Sattui declines to say exactly how much he’s spent building his dream, but he admits that it took “everything I have except my pension plan” to see it come to fruition. Some reports have the price tag as high as $30 million.

According to Doug Osborn, a principal architect for St. Helena-based Lail Design Group who has worked on the castle since 1995, the project has been in a constant state of flux. “I don’t know how many times we did revisions,” he says.

It was these constant revisions that kept the castle interesting and, in a way, even truer to life. “A lot of the aesthetic appeal and beauty of old structures in Europe comes from the fact that they evolved over time,” Osborn explains. “A little was added here. Someone else added something there. It was the combination of different needs and different ideas from different people over time. As an old structure would evolve, it would take off in different directions and respond to new programs and trends. And that’s what happened with this one.”

In the beginning, Sattui planned for a winery modeled after a monastery, with one level above ground and a cellar. “After the original cellar was half built, he decided he wanted to go deeper, so we developed a plan for another cellar to fit below the unbuilt half,” he says.

The castle idea developed over a long period of time. “What he wanted in the beginning evolved into something totally different,” Osborn says. “A lot of times, he changed his direction and we took full advantage of it for the aesthetic appeal. The results were always interesting.”

Sattui would direct masons to install a brick arch and a partial doorjamb and fill it in with stone or brick to make it look like an abandoned door. “Daryl’s a guy who’s really passionate about this project,” Osborn says. “He wanted to make it true throughout even in areas where we didn’t foresee the public ever going.”

For instance, in the gatehouse near the drawbridge, walls are 4 feet thick, with 8 inches of stone veneer on either side of reinforced concrete. There are arrow slots along the wall, where archers would have defended the castle with their bows and arrows. If a visitor should wander in and peer through the slots, they would see the wall’s incredible thickness.

“Sometimes the vision was challenged by requirements of the building codes or the laws of physics,” Osborn says. “Our objective was always to find a way to coordinate the demands of building in the 21st century with our desire to stay true to the style. We often pushed to the limit of the code to make things work aesthetically.”

Osborn says it wasn’t 12 years of continuous effort on his part. “We’d work on it in bursts. We’d develop construction documents for a portion of the project and then Daryl would go and build it. But before he was finished, he would come back to us with a new idea. And we would do it all again.”

All in all, Osborn says, the project was an opportunity to do something fun. “I mean, how many architects get the opportunity to work on a castle with a client who has such a passion for authenticity? It was a childhood fantasy that came true for all of us who were privileged to be connected with it.” 

TM