The Yountville Town Square, created by the addition of a Community Center building to an existing collection of community buildings on the town’s main street, has become the heart of local community life.   The Community Center with its library, teen room, arts facility, and multi-purpose recreational center in combination with the renovated Community Hall, Post Office, County Sheriff’s office, outdoor demonstration kitchen, and public gardens together form a true Town Center for this small rural town.  Conceived as a place to serve the needs of the 3,200 residents of the local community, it has helped to create an authentic identity of place for the town, which has become a world-renowned culinary and wine-country tourist destination.

Through a fusion of architecture and landscape, a portico of deep covered porches and raised bio-filtration planters embrace the recessed Town Square Plaza, utilized as the community’s living room.  A former roadbed is reclaimed as a garden, calming traffic and creating a marker for the Town Square.  All of the site’s stormwater runoff is captured and cleaned before discharging to the nearby stream. Geothermal wells beneath the parking lot serve the building heating and cooling systems.  The landscape integrates the nearby floodplain vegetation with the wooded uplands and savannah while acknowledging the agricultural heritage of the place. The Town Square itself has become an integral part of the Yountville Art Walk with art installations and events in the plaza.  This safe, multi-layered, and fully accessible facility for young and old alike is the result of a decade-long community design process that expresses the distinctive local, cultural, agricultural, oenological, and ecological identity of this Napa community.