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"View Slideshow\n\nWhen a penniless Robert Louis Stevenson honeymooned in Napa Valley, he slept in a run-down shack on Mount St. Helena. Despite his poverty, he was an early connoisseur of the vine, an astute observer of the Napa Valley terroir, a place, as he wrote in 1883, \"where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry.\"\n\nSo there is a bit of poetic irony to be found in the Robert Louis Stevenson Suite at the Poetry Inn, a microclimate of luxury where slippers magically appear beside your bed, the pillow is preordered to your specifications, and killer views from your private terrace lull you into believing that the entire Napa Valley is yours and that you are the only one with the key. Named for Stevenson's now famous phrase, which appears on billboards along Highway 29 welcoming visitors to the valley, the Poetry Inn is perched regally on its own hillside high above Yountville, the down-home country hamlet where the local caf\u00E9 is The French Laundry. The lord-of-the-manor exclusivity begins at the foot of a private drive, which is gated, the entrance code dispensed only to guests.\n\nViews are framed by Backen's signature pocket doors and windows, which can be completely opened to the landscape.\n\nThe inn calls itself a bed-and-breakfast, which is a little bit like considering Michelangelo's David a fine objet d'art. Breakfast is a three-course affair overlooking the valley floor.\n\nThe inn, which is limited to three suites, each with a private terrace and an outdoor shower deck, is the only public accommodation in the Stags Leap district, an appellation synonymous with acclaimed cabernet sauvignons. It is the latest property in the wine phalanx of the eponymous Cliff Lede Vineyards, the Canadian developer turned winemaker whose vineyard, known for limited-production cabs\u2014including his flagship \"Poetry\" blend\u2014forms much of the idyllic rural setting the inn looks down upon.\n\nIf there is such a thing as an architectural terroir, the Poetry Inn may be it. Vineyards crisscross the hillsides. The views of the sun setting behind the Mayacamas range, the valley's sinuous spine, cry out for unwinding in your suite with a good bottle of wine, perhaps over a wood fire; the inn's private cellar has one of the finest selections of European wines in the valley.\n\nThe Stags Leap district bears the name of the rocky palisades that help give the appellation's wine a distinctive style. Its inn is notable for its restraint and intimacy, the feeling of having arrived at a private home where the newspaper comes wrapped in a silk ribbon and a skilled massage therapist fetches you at the door to your suite, robe and slippers in hand. In place of a traditional lobby there is the Great Room, an oasis of monochromatic calm where books on wine await on the low table and mohair throws on leather-and-linen love seats are available for chilly night.\n\nThe feeling of casual appropriateness, of coming home, is what they wanted to achieve.\n\nThe feeling of casual appropriateness, of coming home, was what Howard J. Backen wanted to achieve. Cliff Lede purchased what was then a popcorn-ceilinged, shag-carpeted BB three years ago, first with the idea of transforming it into a residence. \"I would drive by the inn, which had a For Sale sign for a long time,\" Lede recalls. \"There were very few sites for inns in the valley. I gradually became convinced it was like waterfront property and that we should build the most luxurious inn in Napa Valley there.\"\n\nThe year before, the developer had purchased the S. Anderson winery on Yountville Cross Road, known for its sparkling wine. He and Backen, the court architect to a clutch of the valley's most revered vintners, completely reimagined a 1913 Craftsman bungalow as a tasting room, with an outdoor garden and a gallery in the former fermentation room.\n\nThe style of a rarefied shingled cottage was the starting point for the Poetry Inn. \"We took that shingle-roof cottage aesthetic up the hill, so there would be a cohesive set of buildings,\" Backen explains.\n\nThe cottage ambience is expressed in plantation shutters and white grooved ceilings with a slight, barnlike pitch (the Robert Frost Suite even has a hammock). Views are framed by Backen's signature pocket doors and windows, which can be completely opened to the landscape. \"Quite often when you go someplace, you realize there's a barrier between the two of you,\" he says. \"We try not to have that, but it's there when you need it.\"\n\nEach suite has at least one fieldstone terrace and outdoor shower, as well as a soaking tub, double vanities and radiant-heat flooring. \"Napa has an amazing climate for indoor-outdoor living, which you can really embrace when you're staying there,\" says April Powers, who designed the interiors. \"The art is the view.\"\n\nBeing surrounded by vines\u2014tinged with gold in autumn, yellow with mustard in early spring and pregnant with grapes in summer\u2014is intoxicating in itself. Although serious in his commitment to wine, the 50-year-old Lede is not without a sense of humor, naming the sections of his vineyard after classic rock songs\u2014the steep driveway to the inn wends its way past Purple Haze and Hey Jude (a far cry from B\u00E2tard-Montrachet).\n\nHe has also started a BYOB\u2014or Blend Your Own Barrel\u2014program in which, for a mere 15,000 a couple, guests can work with resident winemaker Michelle Edwards to blend their own world-class wine (next opening 2007).\n\n\"A bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in retrospect,\" Robert Louis Stevenson once observed. And if a great wine has a long finish, so does the Poetry Inn.\n\nPoetry Inn\n\n 6380 Silverado Trail\n\n Napa, California 94558\n\n 707-944-0646\n\n www.poetryinn.com"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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