Farmhouse Inn has always been more than a place to stay. It is a family story, a Sonoma story, and a hospitality story shaped by land, food, and the simple pleasure of making people feel at home.
The original farmhouse still anchors the property today, but the spirit of Farmhouse began generations before the inn became what it is now. It began with a family that came to Sonoma to work the land, gather around the table, and welcome people with warmth that never felt scripted.
The story reaches back to Domenico Giovanetti, the family’s great-grandfather, who left the hills outside Como, Italy, as a young teenager to apprentice as a stonemason. His path eventually brought him to San Francisco in the early 1900s, where he worked during the era of the World’s Fair and the construction of the Palace of Fine Arts.
From there, he traveled north to Santa Rosa, helping build local landmarks and finding in Sonoma County a landscape that reminded him of home. It was a place of rolling hills, fertile soil, hard work, and possibility. He stayed.
Before Sonoma became known around the world for wine, the region was shaped by hops, apples, prunes, pears, dairy, and family farms. Domenico built a life here, first sharecropping hops and later establishing the family ranch.
That ranch became the center of family life. Weekends were filled with relatives, neighbors, food, wine, laughter, and long tables set for whoever arrived. Hospitality was not treated as a business strategy. It was simply how the family lived.
That instinct still runs through Farmhouse Inn: notice people, feed them well, pour something good, and make them feel known.
By the late 1990s, siblings Catherine and Joe wanted to create something that honored their family’s roots while opening the door to a more personal kind of Wine Country hospitality. They considered several ideas for the family ranch, but the right opportunity appeared just a few miles down the road: a long-for-sale inn with good bones, a deep sense of place, and room for a bigger dream.
In 2001, they purchased Farmhouse Inn and became innkeepers. Catherine moved upstairs, breakfast was cooked and served by hand, and a small team began shaping a country inn into something more intimate, more refined, and more deeply connected to Sonoma.
The ambition was never to become a large resort. The vision was closer to the small, Michelin-recognized country properties Catherine and Joe loved in Europe: personal, culinary, intimate, and rooted in the land around them.
With chef Steve Litke already part of the property’s story, The Restaurant became central to Farmhouse Inn’s identity. Food gave the inn its rhythm. The table became the place where craft, local relationships, and genuine care came together.
Today, Farmhouse Inn carries that history forward as a 25-room hideaway in Sonoma’s Russian River Valley. The property has evolved, but the promise remains familiar: a quiet room, a memorable meal, a team that knows how to care, and a version of Wine Country that feels personal rather than performed.
Guests do not come here to disappear into a resort. They come to be welcomed into a place with roots. A place where the land, the table, and the people do the storytelling.
When you stay at Farmhouse Inn, you do not simply check in. You come home to Wine Country.
