Inside the Curtis Stone farmhouse at the center of the chef's growing lifestyle empire
If you want to find Curtis Stone, a winding, twisting drive through the Santa Monica Mountains should get you there.
The Melbourne-born celebrity chef and TV personality behind Gwen in Hollywood and the Pie Room by Curtis Stone (in the Beverly Hills space that was his now-shuttered fine dining restaurant Maude) might be filming a cooking demo or tending to his vineyard on his 55-acre farm in Agoura Hills. It's the first farm that Stone has ever owned, and a purchase that's offered new paths for his companies: his own wine label, a production studio he hopes to open to other chefs, an events space and, one day, a vegetable garden.
'I was constantly going, 'We need something bigger,'' he says. 'So when I got this, I'm like, 'That's it. About 60 acres. It can't get bigger.''
Pass through a wrought-iron gate, then dip through a small creek and the white, 1958 ranch-style farmhouse comes fully into view. Beyond it are acres of grapevines on a soft slope, lightly worn paths just visible up the curving hillsides.
The lawns are dotted with large oak and sycamore trees, some of them 400 years old. As the grand limbs fall, wood is chopped and repurposed for live-fire cooking at Gwen and for the grill at the farm, which sits at the east end of the yard and features a smoker, a brick oven and an adjustable, Santa Maria-style grill.
Stone and his family live somewhat nearby, in Brentwood, and all of them help to work the property. One of Stone's sons also uses the grounds as a performance space: Each year they host 'Kidchella,' where 150 guests file in to watch children's bands play while Stone cooks up barbecue.
On a late-April day, Gareth Evans, one of Stone's longtime staff and a former executive chef of Maude, is prepping ingredients and pulling props for Stone's impending shoot for the Home Shopping Network. These happen monthly, a grueling filming marathon that begins at midnight and requires two hours of nonstop cooking demos and interviews, all broadcast live to promote Stone's line of kitchenware sold through HSN.
They shoot in two-hour blocks, rotating between the farmhouse's various cooking stations, whose rolling islands are interchangeable. When the cameras cut away for a 30-second break, Stone and his team will reset or jump to another station, leaping into the next demo. A smaller kitchen — a bit more country-home in design — serves as another shooting locale as well as a prep kitchen. Sometimes these shoots extend to the outdoor patio, draped in hanging strings of wisteria, where its own grill awaits.
Inside a living-room-like staging area with a fireplace and a piano, Stone records podcasts and conducts interviews.
The farmhouse now serves as home base for his growing empire. Stone flies to Australia roughly every eight weeks, but otherwise he's typically found in L.A. It was meeting his wife, Lindsay Price, that put down his roots here.
'I fell in love with this city for all the usual reasons: great weather, good surf and a lot of delicious food,' he says. 'But I decided to stick around when I met Lindsay.'
According to property records, Stone purchased the farm for $4.7 million in 2021. He says it was a pandemic-spurred necessity. Prior to COVID-19, he and his team shot cooking demos in the HSN studios; when lockdown began and in-person production slowed to a halt, he began shooting these spots in his own test kitchen, located above Gwen, and quickly realized he needed more space.
Stone employs a small army, with an increasing number of operations running through the farm. He still maintains a test kitchen and offices above Gwen but is weighing relocating them to his sprawling new Mid-Wilshire bakery, a 6,000-square-foot facility that includes a viennoiserie for laminating croissant dough with butter, a chocolate room, a double-decker bread oven, a proofing station and multiple rotating ovens.
Stone's business realm is vast, with some branches run in partnership with his brother, Luke, and longtime friend Chris Sheldon. For every cooking product Stone develops, he and his team write five to 20 recipes. For those strenuous midnight HSN shoots, he'll staff 50 people on-site. His catering company operates here and in Australia, and feeds as many as 30,000 guests in a day. He helms the food operations at Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens, maintains two restaurants in Los Angeles, an events space in Melbourne and a floating restaurant on a cruise ship. Between his restaurants, production company, catering, and product and recipe teams, he employs around 250 people, plus freelancers. He needed the space.
When Stone obtained the farmhouse property, he inherited an outdoor shipping-container wine bar built just off the farmhouse. He expanded that single metal rectangle and flipped it into what he now calls Shipping Container Village, which includes a walk-in fridge, a commercial kitchen, prop storage, an upgraded wine bar, laundry and offices.
And though winemaking was not a business he ever expected to enter, Stone also found himself with a vineyard when he bought the land.
'The day that we got it, the owner was like, 'All right, so here's the keys, and here's the keys for the tractor.' And I'm like, 'Tractor?'' Stone says. 'She was like, 'Now I don't know if you want to harvest this year or not, but if you want to harvest you probably have to net the vines this week, and you'll harvest in two or three weeks. Here's the number of a guy.''
He's had to learn a lot about wine production, and quickly. (He's also learned how to drive that tractor.)
The result is Four Stones, a wine label named for himself, his wife and their two sons, with grapes grown entirely on the property.
Previous owners planted the vines in 1997, and the roughly 12 acres of vineyard have produced Four Stones' Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, a Bordeaux blend, Cabernet Sauvignon, Moscato and a 50-50 blend of Syrah and Cabernet, with the grapes processed nearby in Westlake where they're pressed, transferred to stainless steel vats and aged in oak barrels. It puts out 230 cases of wine, give or take, which is not large by any commercial standard, but large enough to sell at his restaurants.
Triunfo Canyon's vacillating clime offers warm, direct sun on these south-facing-slope vines by day and cool breezes trapped from the coast by night. The Santa Monica Mountains are dotted with wineries, including Cielo Farms, Colcanyon Estate Wines and Rosenthal.
This spring, Stone's vines are blossoming back to life from a dormant winter, sprouting fruit that will ripen in the summer sun and be ready for an early fall harvest. His sons help train the grapevines up onto wires, and when the time comes, pluck the grapes into buckets, usually eating the fruit as they go.
'If you want your name on the bottle,' Stone says, 'you gotta work.'
But the new venture hasn't been without disaster.
Last year the vines bore nothing — the mountains' deer and white flies beat the family to the fruit.
'The vineyard is something that you spend money on all year, because you water it, there's maintenance, and then you have to prune, and then you have to harvest,' Stone says. 'If you lose your crop, all gone, that's $150,000.'
Someday the chef would like to see sheep grazing between the vines, as they often do in Australia, to help control weed growth. He'd also like to add a menagerie of animals to the farm and plant a large vegetable garden. Local grower Logan Williams of Silver Lake's Logan's Gardens consulted on what might suit the land, and Stone is currently plotting where to begin.
There is near-constant maintenance on his 55 acres. On this April day, a team is not only clearing the brush from the vines but also, near his shed, cleaning what was once a pond, its future use to be determined. In the weeks prior, another tree fell, which will need to be processed for wood if possible.
From a vista near the property line, Stone surveys the vines and the rolling Santa Monica Mountains (a view that also includes a peek at 'The Bachelor' mansion).
'You sort of focus on one thing and you're like, 'Let's get that under control,' and then you turn around and you're like, 'Man, this other thing's totally out of control,'' he says. 'You know, it's a full-time job, but I'm lucky. Look how beautiful this is.'
It's a perfect setting for an outdoor wedding. In fact, he's hosted a few on the property. But rather than using the farm as a dedicated events space, Stone prefers to use it for one-off events such as this month's Great Australian Bite, held in collaboration with the Los Angeles Times.
The May 31 event will feature Stone's cooking in an ode to his homeland, and feature guest chef and Staġuni restaurateur Clare Falzon. Across Stone's farm, they'll be referencing the nation's cuisine through imported ingredients like Skull Island prawns and native mountain pepper, Margra lamb shanks with dates and pistachios, and grilled Wagyu strip loin from Blackmore, one of Australia's forerunners in the breed.
Perhaps someday, Stone says, he'll add an Airstream trailer or other accommodations to the grounds. But for now his focus is mostly on what occurs inside that 1,800-square-foot white farmhouse.
He hopes to create a one-stop shop for cooks and culinary creators, photographers and food stylists who are not only looking for a kitchen set to shoot videos and cooking demos as he does, but also a team of producers to help produce and polish the content for social media or other uses.
'The truth is, we're cooks — we're not social-media geniuses,' he says. 'Some people do it way better than others, and some people outsource it to agencies, but it's become an important part of business in general, especially for restaurants.'
After years in the kitchens of the Savoy and under the tutelage of legendary chef Marco Pierre White, Stone launched his TV career with 'Take Home Chef' and went on to appear on 'Master Chef,' 'Iron Chef,' 'Top Chef' and 'Crime Scene Kitchen.' One of his latest programs, PBS' 'Field Trip With Curtis Stone,' is currently nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award.
He hopes to help other chefs hone on-camera skills as he's done over the years. And afterward, maybe they'll take a bottle of wine or a few logs of fallen oak to remember their time on the farm.
The Great Australian Bite with Curtis Stone and Clare Falzon takes place on Four Stones Farm in Agoura Hills on May 31. Entry includes a multicourse meal highlighting the bounty of Australian cuisine, as well as cocktails, wine, beer and nonalcoholic beverages. Tickets cost $289 and are on sale now.
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