Woodshed Wine Company’s tasting room in Oregon’s Dundee Hills was designed to feel less like a retail space and more like a quiet, weathered structure that happens to pour wine. The project, a finalist in the Hospitality Design category at the 8th annual GRAY Awards, draws its inspiration from the surrounding agricultural buildings and the music of the client’s favorite band, The National. Fieldwork Design & Architecture, the Portland-based studio behind the work, leaned into the band’s subdued, melancholic sound and the cover art from the album “Sleep Well Beast” to shape the interior mood.
The building sits at the base of rolling vineyard hills, positioned to frame views that shift with the seasons. It’s a modest structure — just 910 square feet of conditioned interior space — but it expands outward through covered and uncovered exterior areas that let seating adapt as visitor numbers change throughout the year. At first glance, the building reads as a simple gable-form shed with metal roofing and rough cedar siding. That’s intentional. The design team wanted familiar forms and materials to become something more refined, a structure grounded in its agricultural setting while still feeling deliberate. The façade is arranged to screen the parking lot and road, pulling attention toward the vineyard instead.
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The client is a small, family-owned winery, and the tasting room was part of a larger push to establish their own label. The budget was modest, and the design brief was direct: create something memorable without overspending. Warmth, comfort, discovery, and belonging guided the decisions from the start. Exposed plywood, rough cedar, and concrete kept costs down while giving the space an unexpected level of sophistication.
There’s a certain risk in tying a building’s identity to a band’s aesthetic. The National’s music carries a particular kind of quiet tension, and translating that into architecture could easily become gimmicky. Here, it works because the reference stays subtle — the mood comes through in material texture and light, not in literal nods to album art or lyrics.
Because the winery is young, the design team approached the project with future growth in mind. An initial master plan identified additional spots for future architectural additions, and both the design and construction teams remain involved in the property’s ongoing development. The building was meant to function from day one but also to accommodate whatever comes next for the family business.
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Value and sustainability shaped most of the material choices. Metal roofing offers durability and wildfire protection, a real consideration in Oregon’s wine country. Stained exterior siding and exposed concrete floors are expected to develop a patina over time, which means less maintenance and fewer replacements down the road. The interior plywood warms the space, and filtered natural light gives visitors a reason to linger rather than rush through a tasting. The building was also sited to minimize disruption to existing drainage patterns on the property, which helped reduce infrastructure costs. Efficient plumbing and lighting fixtures round out the practical side of the project.
Fieldwork Design & Architecture, founded in 2011 by interior designer Tonia Hein and architect Cornell Anderson, is a woman-owned studio operating out of Portland, Oregon, and Samsø, Denmark. Their process typically starts with the client’s values and the site’s history, and this project followed that pattern. The result is a tasting room that feels both temporary and permanent — a structure that could pass for an old farm building but is carefully composed down to the last joint. It doesn’t try to shout. It just sits there, quietly, doing exactly what it was built to do.
