A $25.5 Million Napa Ranch Is Perfect for a Long Shelter In Place
The 950-acre property was initially meant for communal living, making it the ideal hideaway for a very wealthy family looking for isolation.
The ranch has its own lake.
Photographer: Bob Rollins for Sotheby’s International Realty
In 1978, four friends set out to buy a house in Napa, Calif., and quickly discovered that they couldn’t afford what they wanted. So they enlisted a larger network of friends—acquaintances, really—to chip in to buy an $850,000, 950-acre property that they broke into 17 shares.
“We set up this communal landowning experiment,” says Bob Dickinson, one of the property’s stakeholders and the owner of Full Flood, a lighting design company. “We all were in our 20s or thereabouts, and we bought it—probably didn’t analyze it correctly—but got lucky. It turned out that we owned a piece of the most outstanding property, the kind people in California dream of.”