Sosta House

When the Ponzi family moved to Oregon in the late 1960s, this was the first place they called home. Dick and Nancy built the house themselves with help from friends, planted their first vineyard beside it in 1969, and raised a family in it. Their daughter grew up here. Cousins ran between the house and the vines.

Nico and Mia Ponzi Hamacher climbed the fig tree in the yard looking for fruit and hid under the basement stairs during hide and seek. They took the house on in 2022 after it had sat empty for several years, spent a year restoring it with family and friends, and opened Sosta House in July 2023. Their 90-year-old grandfather helped rebuild the back deck and the front desk. One of Mia’s friends stitched the curtains on their grandmother’s sewing machine.

The name means “little rest” in Italian.

Mia’s framing of the place is the right one: they never wanted it to feel like a sterile hotel. They wanted it to feel lived in. Most of the artwork came from their own network. As Nico puts it, it isn’t perfected and manufactured, and that’s part of the magic.

The house has a funky Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired spirit — angular, warm, with a sprawling deck over the valley. Three guest rooms, plus a Great Room open to everyone for dining, reading, working, or sitting by the fireplace.

Mia is the chef, and the food is what people write about. Breakfast daily, made to order and adapted to dietary needs asked about in advance. On set evenings she cooks wine dinners paired with her father’s wines — Eric Hamacher makes wine steps away.

Outside there’s a barrel sauna from a Portland maker with windows for daylight, and a cold plunge built from a repurposed wine fermenter from the winery’s early days, fitted with a custom cedar insert. Bocce courts, gardens, historic vineyards to walk, records to play, and a number of farm cats.

They also run an artist residency, a summer concert series, and an annual Fig Fest — the last two open to the public whether or not you’re staying.

Less than thirty minutes from downtown Portland, which is the part people find hardest to believe.