The 42-foot-high pavilion, reminiscent of a Chinese pagoda, designed by Michael Booth of Babey, Moulton, Jue & Booth was built in 2001 and serves as an exotic venue for parties.


McEvoy Ranch sits on 550 acres in the rolling hills west of Petaluma in Northern California. Once a dairy farm, it has now been reincarnated as an organic olive tree orchard. The ranch is also a country home for Nan McEvoy and a place where she can spend time with her grandchildren.

Never afraid to fly in the face of convention, Nan McEvoy’s decision to erect a towering Chinese pavilion nestled amongst the Tuscan olive trees and traditional ranch-style home she built on the property in 1997 now provides a welcome and unexpected twist to the surrounding landscape. Enamored of the public gardens she had visited outside Shanghai and the river rock and tile paving used to mark their paths, Nan commissioned New Zealand artist Mark Davidson to design and hand-lay the intricate geometric-patterned floor of stones, most of which were culled from her own backyard. Another of the pagoda’s unique design features drawn straight from the land are the giant copper lizards slithering up its roof, based on real versions called skinks which scurry around the property. Now the official ranch mascot, the skink appears on every label of McEvoy Ranch olive oil. Today, the pagoda has evolved into a key place to entertain guests.

Other facilities on the ranch include our Frantoio (Italian olive oil mill) and retail store, both of which are open to the public during tour season. Head Gardener Margaret Koski-Kent has sculpted a large organic garden covering well over two acres, which supplies seasonal produce for ranch staff and for the McEvoy family as well as provides an array of botanicals which are used in our estate-produced items sold at our retail store at the ranch and at the San Francisco Ferry Building Marketplace, as well as online. There is also a large country kitchen, where under the direction of Head Chef Gerald Gass and his colleague, Mark Rohrmeier, all ranch hospitality and daily core staff lunches are planned and executed, with recipes inspired by the glorious organic bounty that flourishes just outside the back door.


During the early days of transforming a run-down dairy farm into something else altogether, whenever possible, old barns were repaired and given a new lease on life.

In one case however, a derelict building was in such ruin that Nan recalls in the Introduction to The Olive Harvest Cookbook phoning the local fire department and asking if the firemen would like to set it ablaze for a practice session. They took her up on the offer and the rest is history—as is the old barn.