For years, Steven Bochco, the late writer and producer of TV shows including NYPD Blue, Doogie Howser, M.D., and L.A. Law, would go on weekend trips in Napa Valley with his wife, Dayna. “My husband was from New York City,” she says. “But he just fell in love with Northern California. It was different from what he was used to, but its charms grew on him.”
After spending a few years staying at hotels, the couple, who lived full time in Los Angeles, decided to buy, quickly homing in on a French country-style manse set on 47 acres in Oakville, a few minutes from the famous Opus One Winery. “It just seemed to have our name on it,” Bochco says. The property is about an hour-and-a-half drive from San Francisco and 20 minutes from downtown Napa.
The mansion was built in 2002, she says, and there was very little to do after they bought it in 2008. Their only addition was a guesthouse, which increased the property’s total interior square footage to about 5,600 square feet. The main house has three bedrooms and three and a half baths, while the guesthouse has two bedrooms and two baths.
“We’d go up almost once a month and spend three or four days there,” Bochco says. “It was a place to chill out.”
In 2014, Steven was diagnosed with leukemia, and though a bone marrow transplant initially worked, he suffered from several remissions. He died in 2018.
Now, Bochco is putting the house on the market, listing it for $8.5 million with Ginger Martin of Sotheby’s International Realty and Hillary Ryan of Compass.
“I’d never sell the place if he was still with me,” she says. “It was our place, and I still love it.”
The House
The main house was only six years old when the couple purchased it, and “the guys we bought it from were designers themselves and had done an absolutely beautiful job,” Bochco says. “We bought a lot of the furnishings with the house—it just looked right. And then our designer Charles Allem came out a year or so later and freshened everything up.”
The couple entertained frequently. The layout when they bought the house contained a kitchen that was “very closed off,” she says. “We do a lot of cooking and sitting around the kitchen with our friends, so we opened it up to a seating and entertaining area that made it a little more fitted to our lifestyle.”