Sonoma designer Mark Wilson: A sense of space and place

A great restaurant experience isn’t all about the food. The ambiance of the space, the comfort of the seating and the even play of the lighting all set the mood for a magical experience.

Sonoma interior designer Mark Wilson knows just how to make a restaurant special, a hotel lobby inviting and a luxury suite extra relaxing. Now he and his business partner Yoko Ishihara of Wilson Ishihara Design are putting finishing touches on their design for the Lodge at Sonoma Resort and its revamped restaurant.

They conceptualized the new Wit and Wisdom restaurant that will open soon at the hotel in the space that was formally the Carneros restaurant. The hotel partnered with the powerhouse restaurateur Michael Mina for the new eating establishment that they hope will draw a local clientele in addition to hotel guests.

Wilson and Ishihara have also completely enlivened the hotel lobby and four suites, a project that has been in the works for almost two years.

One of the joys of the job for Wilson was having a project right in this hometown. He has traveled traveled the world as a hospitality designer so working locally is a dream. He and Ishihara both had long careers at an international design firm based in Marin until launching their own firm five years ago, with Wilson based here and Ishihara in Oakland.

“When you go to Prague on Thursday and return Tuesday it sounds glamorous but it quickly gets old. The work was great, but it’s also exhausting when you are constantly on a plane and frequently away from home,” he said. By the time he left his old firm he had 800,000 frequent flier miles.

He still travels but mostly in the United States. They designed the Worthington Hotel and its restaurant Toro Toro in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Lona restaurant in the Westin in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. But much of their work is now in Wine Country and the Bay Area.

Chatting at a picnic table on the Plaza, his gray-streaked hair pulled back in a ponytail, Wilson’s dimples are constantly showing as he smiles enthusiastically talking about how much he enjoys his career and life in Sonoma.

He’s an early riser and is at his desk working away by 5:30 a.m., taking a break about three hours in to walk with his wife Colleen to Sonoma Valley Hospital where she works as recruiter, their two dogs along for the stroll.

Wilson is from Massachusetts and that’s where they met, both working as waiters while he was getting his degree in design at UMass Amherst. His believes working in restaurants during his younger years contributes to his ability in hospitality design – he knows firsthand the inner workings of the restaurant world.

Colleen is a Sonoma County native and she missed family so the couple moved back to California, first to San Francisco before buying their home in Sonoma in 1998, a home where they plan to stay forever.

“I don’t want to live anywhere else. It’s as close as you can get to living in Europe without being in Europe,” he said.

Although Wilson Ishihara clients are usually big corporations like Diamond Rock Properties, which owns the Lodge, sometimes life in a small town even leads to new opportunities. Wilson Ishihara designed the Sigh champagne tasting room because Colleen’s hairdresser is Sigh owner Jayme Powers’ sister – and that is how the connection, which is now a close friendship, began.

“I had never worked with a design firm before and it was so much fun. Mark and Yoko are amazingly talented,” Powers recalled about their nine-month overhaul of her Sigh venue, which opened in June 2017 when it moved to Napa Street from Vine Alley. “They really took everything up a notch and had great ideas.”

Wilson said another project that was a special experience was designing the new Sweet T’s restaurant in Windsor after the owners lost their original establishment in Fountain Grove when it burned to the ground in the 2017 Tubbs Fire.

“It was a meaningful project because they were so sad and it was wonderful to be able to help them bring their restaurant back.”

Currently they are working on a new designs for the lobby, restaurants and cabins for the Landing Resort at Lake Tahoe and a redo at Cavallo Point Lodge in Sausalito. “It is so nice not to be constantly driving to SFO,” Wilson said.

“We are very concept driven when we get a new project. The stronger the story the stronger the design becomes,” he said. “Then every time we’re making a decision we ask ourselves, ‘Does that fit the concept?’”

Since the coronavirus outbreak they have done some pro-bono layouts for outside seating for restaurants they designed. “There will have to be a lot of creative solutions for restaurants during this time,” he said. “We are a social society and people are still going to want to out.”