Interior designer Kim Munizza of the firm known as Mithun says her team chose concrete for the Novelty Hill-Januik Winery for a combination of its artistic potential and the practical necessities of a facility in which wine would be made.
“It came largely from the wine-making process itself,” Munizza said. “We were looking for something fairly monolithic and based on the temperature control, and the ability not to grow bacteria, among other things. Plus, the beauty of the material itself and the budgets. We looked around and concrete appeared to be the winner in every category.”
Munizza said her team had never before attempted a highly artistic design using concrete as the primary material. But the 31,000-square-foot building has drawn raves. Lawrence Cheek, author of “Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona,” wrote in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: “It's so good, in fact, that visitors should take a long, slow walk through and around the generous public spaces to drink in all the delectable details before indulging in even the slightest fog of alcohol. This is a building that can change your mind about concrete, the industrial aesthetic, and what you once might have thought was the arid wasteland of modernist minimalism.”