Santa Ynez Valley Renovation
La Tarantella
A Valley Wedding Destination
La Tarantella is an Italianate villa designed by architect Peter Choate, standing on roughly 102 acres of meadow and hillside oak in Happy Canyon. Just under six thousand square feet, entered through a courtyard, with a great room that opens beneath vaulted beams. The couple who built it in the early 1990s traveled the world and brought the best of it home, and the villa carries the patina of somewhere far older than it is.
In 2022 the Grassini family, whose vineyard had grown up around the property, acquired the villa with an idea: that a private residence could become one of the most beautiful places in the valley to be married. Santa Barbara designer Corinne Mathern was commissioned to restore the house inside and out.
DAC Builds was brought onto the project for our work in historic restoration and the standard of detail that work demands. The villa is younger than the material it is built from, but it asks for the same discipline. Rooms finished in imported stone and antique timber leave no margin for approximation.
Venue // La Tarantella
Interior Designer // Corinne Mathern Studio
Builder // DAC Builds
Photographer // Nicole Franzen
We were entrusted with the spaces at the center of the idea.
What had been a primary suite and two bedrooms are now the bride suite, the groom suite, and dressing room. Giving a room a new purpose takes more than a new look. Every line had to be redrawn for a purpose the house was never built to serve, and the result had to arrive looking as though it had always been that way.
The dressing room shower is finished in full stone slab.
Slab leaves nowhere to hide. Each piece is cut once, carried in whole, and set with almost no joint to absorb an error, so the stone reads as a single continuous surface, the way it came out of the ground.
It is the part of this project we are proudest of.
The villa opened that fall as a wedding destination, and the rooms we renovated are where every celebration begins.
Your home could be next.
Imagine walking through your finished home the way our clients do: proud of every detail and ready to have people over. When you’re ready for that moment, connect with us, a Santa Barbara remodeling contractor who cares about your home and your family.