Drive up Montgomery Drive toward Spring Lake and you used to pass a building that looked like it was waiting to be torn down. Vaulted roofline, faded signage, a parking lot that stayed empty except for the occasional teenager who'd pulled in to turn around. That was The Villa for most of three years, the retro Italian dining room that Gaspare Bernardo ran for nearly five decades before he closed it in 2022. This spring it reopened under a new name, and the fact that it reopened at all, in the same building, with the same doors, tells you something about how this city treats the places it doesn't want to lose.
The building is now The Junction, and it's one of two long-dormant Santa Rosa properties that came back this year in a way worth paying attention to if you live here. Neither one got knocked down and rebuilt as something generic. Both kept the bones. That's not an accident, and once you see the pattern in one, you start noticing it everywhere else too.
The Junction sits on 3.5 acres above Trione-Annadel State Park, on the same site that opened in 1962 as a mid-century supper club called The Hilltopper, then spent nearly fifty years as Bernardo's Italian restaurant. When Bernardo retired in 2022, the building sat vacant long enough that most people driving past assumed it was headed for redevelopment. Instead, a trio of Mill Valley restaurateurs, Liz and Dez Fiedler along with business partner Jimmy Simpson, bought the property and spent a year rebuilding it before opening on May 11, 2026, with Pizza Hacker's Jeff Krupman anchoring the menu.
What they built is a 150-seat dining room and bar attached to a 4,000-square-foot beer garden with a play structure, a live-music stage, and 30 taps that Sonoma Magazine reported rarely sit idle during dinner rush. Unlike the Fiedlers' original Junction in Mill Valley, this one has a full bar. But the part that says the most about what they were trying to do isn't the beer list. It's what they chose to keep: the original front doors with their half-moon cutouts, the vaulted ceilings, and the old Villa sign at the bottom of the hill, restored rather than replaced.
Liz Fiedler put it plainly to Sonoma Magazine after the opening: "We feel so lucky that we got to inherit this iconic spot. We really didn't realize how much the space means to the community." That sentiment showed up in the room too. Bernardo himself, now in his 80s, came to the opening weekend and sat with his family over pizza while Fiedler watched what she called the transformation of a space that had been dormant for years. By its second week, the restaurant was already running at capacity on a property with more than 500 seats between the dining room and patio, prompting Fiedler to note that not many places get a fully packed house their first weekend open.
The one real complaint so far is parking. During busy hours cars line the steep driveway up to the restaurant, and regulars have already learned to park below and walk up, treating the climb as an excuse for an extra order of fried cheese curds.
The second revival tells a similar story with a longer résumé. The address is 3535 Guerneville Road in west Santa Rosa, and the structure there dates to 1944. It has changed identities more times than most buildings change tenants:
Owner Stephen Hansel told the Press Democrat that rising food costs and declining foot traffic drove the closure after more than a decade at the location. Now the building is getting its eighth act as Owl & The Vine, a wine bar and taproom from Lawrence and Stephanie Bondulich, a husband-and-wife team relocating from New York. The Bondulichs currently run Bin 71, a 21-year-old Italian enoteca on Manhattan's Upper West Side with more than 100 wines by the bottle, along with a cocktail bar called The Owl's Tail. This will be their first venture in Sonoma County.
As of this writing the exact opening date hasn't been announced, though the business's own site points to late summer 2026, and a liquor license filing with the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control confirms the Guerneville Road address is locked in. Menu details haven't been released yet, but the couple's message on their website says they're hoping to bring the community together in what they call a special place, language that echoes what Fiedler said about the hilltop three miles away.
It would be easy to read too much into two restaurants and call it a citywide trend. Plenty of what's opening in Santa Rosa this year is exactly what you'd expect from a growing restaurant scene: new concepts filling ordinary retail space. Olives and Agave, a tapas and Mediterranean spot, is set to replace Cascabel at 909 Village Court in Montgomery Village, which quietly closed in May 2025. Hapa's on the Mainland, a Hawaiian restaurant from the team behind Sweet T's in Windsor, was working through permitting as of June at the rebuilt Cricklewood site on Old Redwood Highway, with an opening still targeted for later this year. Both are good additions. Neither one is inheriting a building with a story attached.
That contrast is what makes The Junction and Owl & The Vine worth noticing. When outside operators, one team from Mill Valley, one couple from New York, went looking for a place to put real money into Santa Rosa, they didn't pick a blank commercial shell. They picked buildings that other people had already decided were done, and they bet that the history built into the walls was worth preserving rather than erasing. On the hilltop above Annadel, that bet has already paid off in packed weekends. On Guerneville Road, the town will find out by the end of summer.
If you've been driving past either of these buildings for the last few years wondering what was going to happen to them, you now have your answer, and it's a more interesting one than a fresh coat of paint on a chain concept.
A few practical notes if you're planning a visit to either spot. The Junction is family and dog friendly, with a screen-free arcade near the entrance for kids while the adults linger over pizza. Parking is tight on busy nights, so consider the lot below and the walk up part of the experience rather than a problem to solve. Owl & The Vine doesn't have a confirmed open date yet, so if you're curious, keeping an eye on their Guerneville Road signage over the coming weeks is your best bet for catching opening night at a building that has been welcoming Santa Rosa regulars in one form or another since 1944.
Santa Rosa doesn't tear down its landmarks so much as it waits for someone with the right vision to walk back through the door. If you're the kind of person who notices when a building like that finally reopens, and you ever find yourself wondering what a property with that kind of history and potential might be worth, Mark Stornetta has spent more than forty years paying attention to exactly this corner of Sonoma County. A confidential conversation costs nothing and starts with what you're curious about, not what you're ready to list.
Compass
135 W Napa St. #200, Sonoma, CA 95476
CA DRE# 01440416
Mark Stornetta