The Madrona in Healdsburg just landed on the MICHELIN Guide’s “10 Most Beautiful Hotels in California” for 2025 — a design-forward list that spotlights places where the setting and interiors carry as much weight as service and amenities.
It’s not The Madrona’s only MICHELIN distinction. The hotel also holds Two MICHELIN Keys, the Guide’s new award for an exceptional stay.
Recent chapter: reboot and recognition
In early 2021, an investor group led by designer Jay Jeffers bought the eight‑acre estate, then closed for a top‑to‑bottom renovation of the 1881 mansion, carriage house and historic bungalows. The project — about $6 million in work after an $8.6 million purchase — reopened as The Madrona in April 2022, with Jeffers’ eclectic, Aesthetic‑Movement‑inspired interiors, contemporary art, and layers of antiques. MICHELIN later profiled the design as a full‑tilt nod to the 19th‑century Aesthetic Movement.
Architecture and origins (1862—1906)
The property’s core is Paxton’s mansion: a three‑story, Second Empire house with a mansard roof and Gothic dormers, built in 1880—81 as the centerpiece of “Madrona Knoll Rancho.” The historic complex also includes a two‑story carriage house, a small “pantry” outbuilding, and a simple schoolhouse structure. Gas lighting was plumbed to the house and barn in December 1880; by 1906, affidavits described the house as “electric lighted.”
Its builder, banker and entrepreneur John A. Paxton, also commissioned a gravity‑flow stone winery just north of the residence in 1887 (by famed winery designer Hamden W. McIntyre). The structure collapsed in the 1906 earthquake and was never rebuilt — a reminder that wine history in Sonoma and Napa was reshaped by that disaster…