This New Napa Valley Luxury Resort Has 2 Mountain-view Pools and Gorgeous Suites — on a 712-acre Ranch

I pulled up to Stanly Ranch, Auberge Resorts Collection’s newest Napa Valley luxury resort, just before 9 p.m. on a Sunday evening in July, in time to catch the last few minutes of the sunset. The pink-orange haze enveloped the vines of the 712-acre ranch in the fleeting light — the kind you don’t bother to take a picture of because that type of glow just doesn’t stick around. Sure enough, by the time I checked in — greeted, of course, with a glass of cabernet sauvignon, in true Napa fashion — and took a golf cart ride to my room, the property was completely submerged in darkness. (I leaned into it, stepping out on my spacious back patio with a cup of tea and cranking the nob to light the fire pit.)

Stanly Ranch, Auberge Resorts Collection, opened in April 2022, with 135 cottage-inspired rooms (some are stand-alone), but the actual ranch dates back to the 1850s. It was founded by Judge Edward Stanly — hence the name — as a fully functioning farm. The resort now has decidedly more modern offerings: a robust residential program of 40 villas (all two bedrooms) and 70 vineyard homes (three to six bedrooms), all with multimillion-dollar price tags; a luxe spa, Halehouse; an impressive art piece called “Infinity” by Gordon Huether that creates an optical illusion at the highest point on property. And yet, the beautifully thought out upscale touches — for example, in the alfresco spa relaxation area, you can have either a cup of bone broth or a glass of chardonnay by the fire — doesn’t stop the hotel from celebrating the farm’s initial purpose.

“Stanly Ranch is a working ranch, and over the next several years, we are looking forward to seeing the vineyards fill out across the property and eventually having our own winery and wines,” Craig Reid, president and CEO of Auberge Resorts Collection, tells Travel + Leisure. There are already some thriving vines producing chardonnay and pinot noir grapes, which area wineries buy up. But it’s the younger vines, still far from yielding any fruit, that may one day get crushed and fermented into a Stanly Ranch–labeled wine. 

In the last two years, the Napa hotel scene has, like the corks at BottleRock each year, popped off. Four Seasons opened in Calistoga, across the street from Solage, Auberge Resorts Collection. Hyatt luxury brand Alila took over a restored mansion in St. Helena — once a Luxury Collection hotel called Las Alcobas, and still home to Acacia House, serving up what locals point to as the best margarita in Napa. 

This hotel surge stems from one property: Auberge du Soleil, the very first Auberge in a now 22-resort portfolio, which opened in the 1980s and is largely thought of as the first upscale hotel in Napa. The valley’s wine culture was just catching on in the early ‘80s, and Auberge du Soleil (initially a restaurant, despite the fact that auberge means “inn” en Français) pivoted to accommodate Napa visitors who, in finding how much they loved the region’s wine, imbibed just enough to, well, stay the night rather than driving home. 

Nearly 40 years later, in 2020, an upsetting and somewhat contradictory pattern emerged: The rise in building luxury hotels coincided with some of the most devastating fires in Napa’s history. The Glass Fire, which burned from Sept. 27, 2020 to Oct. 20, 2020, took an awful toll on the high-end hospitality offerings in Napa — harming more than 20 wineries, causing $100 million worth of damage to Michelin three-starred restaurant Meadowood, and destroying Calistoga Ranch, once the third Auberge Resorts Collection property in Napa. 

Sitting by the main pool, with cabanas and hanging egg chairs kept in line by a newly planted perimeter of lavender fields, I ask area marketing manager Melissa Douma what it was like when Calistoga Ranch burned down. We’re rocking in the egg chairs, facing the pool and alfresco Basin Bar under clear, blue skies — and the mere concept of wildfires seems a world away. “It’s one of those things where you don’t really know what you’ve got till it’s gone. It’s kind of like mourning a loss,” she says. There’s a beautiful sense of hope in the way she explains how the Auberge community has acknowledged and worked through the loss, while treating the new Stanly Ranch as a completely new venture, rather than a Calistoga Ranch replacement.

The paper trail proves it’s not a replacement: “Auberge Resorts Collection began work as the management company for Stanly Ranch in 2014,” says Reid. That’s six years before the Glass Fire. “The vision for Stanly Ranch has always been to create a new generation Napa resort that is a destination unto itself, driven by bold and active experiences, nature, well-being, and exceptional culinary experiences.”

Exceptional culinary is exactly what I found at Bear, the main on-site dining venue — part of a lovely collection of common area buildings, including the reception pavilion and the coffee shop Gavel, all finished in light brown wood and chardonnay-colored stonework with black steel accents.

I ate solo three times at Bear, but my favorite meal was dinner on my final night at Stanly, enjoyed outside wrapped in a blanket, with a full view of the fireplace-clad lawn, the main pool, and the sun setting over the Mayacamas Mountains beyond. Dinner was a colorful array of vegetables picked from the garden (about 40 yards from where I was sitting), some notably excellent cultured butter and freshly baked sourdough, seared scallops, and cabernet franc. And toward the end of my second glass of wine, I could’ve sworn I caught a glimpse of the same light that greeted me on my way into the ranch.