Art collector couple builds museum-size cave in Napa for collection

Amid the vineyards and mountainous terrain of Napa Valley, tony homes stand above ground with significant structures reaching into the earth below, from basements to complex water and firefighting systems to wine cellars.

Then there is something entirely unheard of in these parts, and perhaps anywhere: a massive art cave hewn into the hillside of a Wine Country estate - a secret subterranean lair straight out of "Batman."

San Francisco couple Norah and Norman Stone, already renowned in jet-set circles for their playful personas and modern art collection, created even more of a stir when they unveiled the cave - and a new experiential water and sky sculpture by James Turrell - to the art world and friends at a splashy party over the last weekend of October.

Like other homeowners who outgrow their residences or amass too much stuff, they needed an add-on. In their case, it wasn't a new bedroom attached to their Pacific Heights mansion or their Wine Country farmhouse, but a 5,700-square foot cave in which to display the vast number of oversize works they have purchased through the years. Most are simply too big to display in a home and require a museum-sized space to be seen. And with cost as no deterrent - Norman Stone's father was the late billionaire insurance magnate W. Clement Stone - the sky was literally the limit.

"It's a private gallery," Norman Stone said. "It's not big enough for a museum."

Art critics, art journal writers, museum curators and fellow collectors marveled at the cave, set well back from Highway 29 in a terraced hill in which a plum orchard for prunes stood in the days of Prohibition.

Commissioned in 2005, it was created by the New York architectural firm Bade Stageberg Cox. Its entrance is marked by steel doors and its interior is vaulted, spacious and light. The cave is reminiscent of Napa Valley wine caves, but "there is nothing else like it in the world as a space to display art," according to a booklet created by the architects that explains how the property's components work together.

Neal Benezra, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, echoed those sentiments.

"It is a totally original place to look at art - a gorgeous, light-filled volume of space," he said. "This is the first cave that I have seen employed for the display of art and so, as always, Norman and Norah are trend-setters."

The Stones call the compound Stonescape. Its elements include the Skyspace by Turrell, a light sculpture within their outdoor swimming pool; an outdoor sculpture by Cady Noland called "Log Cabin Blank with Screw Eyes and Cafe Door;" and their weekend retreat, a 120-year-old farmhouse.

The art cave is a marvel that few will ever get to see. It contains 25 installations that will be viewed by 12 to 15 art groups each year. Visitors will be limited to friends and groups of serious collectors and high-level museum donors from around the globe making museum-led trips to the Bay Area, and not to tourists in buses.

Collectors tend not to allow visitors outside elite ranks to view their collections - even if they happen to belong to a museum's general membership base - because such guests are often not well-versed enough in art to understand or appreciate what they are seeing. (Norah Stone recalled an occasion during which one such guest became bored and asked her to call a cab so he could leave.)

But why build something that nobody in the public can see? For ego? To impress friends?

Neither, the Stones said.

"We did it because we wanted to enjoy our art collection in a way we hadn't been able to," Norah Stone said. "We'll be changing the pieces every year. We have hundreds of pieces."

To sell or otherwise rid themselves of some of the pieces is anathema to them, at least judging by Norah Stone's response to that suggestion - an exclamation that sounded as if she had been poked in the stomach with a sharp stick.

"We like contemporary art, cutting-edge art and art we think reflects what's happening in the culture and the world," she said.

And young artists these days, she said, tend to create oversize pieces with museum exhibitions in mind, which is how they end up with enormous pieces that need storing in warehouses, rather than hung on a wall over a couch.

"Our end game for collecting," said Norman Stone, "is to give it to museums. So to sell it wouldn't make a lot of sense to us."

The Stones are an unusual pair by high-society standards. Norman Stone, 68, dabbled in venture capital and then took art lessons before earning a degree in clinical psychology. He works part-time as a therapist at a city mental health clinic in Hunter's Point, one of San Francisco's edgier neighborhoods, where he has counseled crack addicts and other patients for 27 years. He is a trustee at SFMOMA and president of the W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation, which gave $4.5 million in 2006 to programs centered on education, childhood and youth.

Norah Stone, 69, is a former corporate attorney and chair of SFMOMA's Director's Circle.

Together, they collect art, make Cabernet Sauvignon under the Stonescape label and enjoy a certain joie de vivre, hosting elaborate costume parties every summer that are the talk of the social scene. They also are affiliated with the Tate Gallery in London and the Whitney Museum in New York.

Friends describe them as exuberant - bungee jumping on vacation and swimming in the Rhine River - and they appear that way outwardly as well, wearing wildly colorful and imaginative clothing (including blazers made from bubble wrap).

It is their passion for life and art that makes them interesting clients, indicated their art adviser, Thea Westreich in New York, who has worked with the couple for 17 years. The Stones, she said, are a rare breed of collector who purchase art because it stirs them, and not to dazzle friends with flashy names such as Warhol, or pieces that cost millions. The couple enjoys the intellectual puzzle of wondering how their collected works might fit together and had no way of making that happen without a large gallery space in which to try it.

"It wasn't a need to build an art cave," Westreich said. "So much as it was a desire borne of the same interest that guided the collection to begin with - a desire and curiosity about the work they own and how it interfaces with other work. They needed a place to install and reinstall so it works in different contexts."

Among the pieces on display in the cave are a Stonehenge-like sculpture by Richard Serra called "Square Level Forged," a room full of photographs surrounding a bronze cube by Keith Tyson, called "The Block," and "Adjustable Wall Bra," by Vito Acconci, an 8-by-22-by-6-foot sculpture that is a giant white bra with benches inside the cups for viewers to sit on, while listening to a recording of a woman breathing.

Norman Stone, when asked what he liked about the bra, said, "The breast is a really important symbolic body part that cuts across all cultures. Being breast-fed, if it's a happy experience, is extraordinarily serene. When you see a baby being breast-fed, that's pure. They're not thinking about what's going to happen tomorrow at work, or how they're going to pay their bills. They're one with the breast.

"And so, with this bra, you go back and sit in the bra, and hear the heavy breathing, which is what the child would hear, its mother's breath, and hopefully you think about those kinds of things and whatever kinds of associations they produce - the moments in your life where you had something close to that experience, or where you wonder, 'Why didn't I?' " he said.

"Every person would bring a different narrative. I think it's a very powerful symbol. But it's also a very complex, smart, beautiful object. All that interests us."

And so, on opening night, they delighted in the reactions of their guests.

"We find it a special experience to see a good collection," Norman Stone said. "If we can offer that opportunity to our friends and the art world, we're happy to participate. It's a transcendent experience for us."

E-mail Carolyne Zinko at czinko@sfchronicle.com.