Five couples spent a weekend together in Napa Valley and, after a long day of wine tasting, they decided two days just wasn’t enough. “We’d all had a bit too much to drink, and we started talking about how great it would be to have a shared vacation home,” says Nic Ehr, a principal and owner of Remick Associates, a high-end design-build firm. “The next morning, only 5 of the original 10 people were still interested.”

The committed group—Ehr and his partner, Yalek Ho, Susan Pilcher, Elaine Ziemba and Rory Snyder—began to search for the perfect property. “We exhausted several real estate agents in Napa and Sonoma counties looking for just the right place,” says Ehr. “The must-have list was long: It had to be close enough to town so getting a quart of milk wasn’t a hassle; there could be no traffic noise; there had to be some kind of view, preferably pastoral; and there could be no visible neighbors.”