Inside the LOLA House
A 130-Year-Old Home That Became Napa's Most Intimate Tasting Room
A Ruin With a Soul
In 2012, The LOLA House was a ruin. Built in 1892, the property had been neglected long enough that most people drove past without a second look.
Seth leased it anyway. He and the owner restored it together — slowly, properly, with period-appropriate materials and no shortcuts. Seth lived there first, before it ever became a tasting room.
Today the LOLA House is one of the most intimate and authentic tasting room experiences in Calistoga — a working historic home, not a purpose-built venue, where the wines are poured in rooms that Seth and Rafa chose every piece of art for personally.
One detail says everything: the fence around the house is built from vine posts pulled from Seth's own vineyard plots. Wood that held up grapevines, now holding up the place where those grapes are poured as wine.
You probably won't notice it consciously. You'll feel it.
Pic of renovation
He Lived There First
Most winery tasting rooms are designed from scratch to receive guests. The LOLA House is something different — and you feel it the moment you walk in.
After beginning the restoration in 2012, Seth moved in and lived there for six years before opening the doors to guests. The art on the walls was chosen because Seth and Rafa loved it. The garden — with its two palm trees and quiet courtyard — was tended personally, season after season. Nothing was installed for ambiance. It was simply a home, cared for by the people who lived in it.
When LOLA officially opened as a Calistoga tasting room in 2018, Seth and Rafa weren't launching a hospitality concept. They were inviting people into a place they had already made their own.
That is impossible to fake. It is also, in a valley full of purpose-built tasting rooms, increasingly rare — and exactly what makes the LOLA House one of the most genuine wine experiences in Napa Valley.
The LOLA House has been standing since 1892. It nearly didn't survive. Someone believed it was worth saving, did the work to save it, and now pours wine inside it every day.
That is, in the end, what LOLA is about.
Why the LOLA House Matters
Napa Valley tasting rooms have trended toward luxury, exclusivity, and architecture as statement. The LOLA House went the other way — deliberately.
Seth found a ruin everyone else had passed by, leased it, restored it by hand with classical methods and wood from his own vineyards, and lived in it for six years before pouring a single glass for a guest. No architects hired to impress. No prestige address. Just a 130-year-old Victorian in Calistoga, brought back to life by someone who believed it deserved another chance.
Guests who visit for the first time use the same word repeatedly: surprised. Surprised to find something this warm, this personal, this real — in a valley that has spent two decades becoming considerably more expensive and considerably less human.
That surprise is the point. And it is entirely earned.