The Yountville Town Council voted 5–0 on June 2 to repeal the zoning behind Yountville Commons, a publicly-funded workforce-housing project on the former elementary school site — pausing it after a resident referendum that grew out of French Laundry chef Thomas Keller's objections to a studio-heavy design.

On a roughly seven-acre lot around the corner from The French Laundry — the former Yountville Elementary School, closed for lack of children in a town of just over 3,000 — Napa County's most famous village had a plan to build housing for the people who cook, clean, and pour in its Michelin-starred dining rooms. As of June 2, that plan is shelved.

The Yountville Town Council voted 5–0 that Tuesday to pass a citizen referendum against Yountville Commons, undoing the rezoning it had approved in February and the tentative map that had carved the site into 18 parcels. The project isn't formally dead — council members framed the repeal as a reset — but there are no active entitlements on the ground, and no first phase breaking soil in 2027 as once floated.

The reversal traces to a familiar Wine Country figure. The French Laundry's chef and owner, Thomas Keller, went before the council urging delay, objecting not to housing but to its shape. "A studio-heavy, dormitory-style approach with minimal parking doesn't match how people actually live or work in this town," Keller wrote in a joint statement with Arik Housley of Yountville's Ranch Market. A citizen referendum qualified in March with roughly 200 signatures — about 10 percent of the town's voters — enough to freeze the project and force the council to either adopt the changes outright or send them to the ballot. It chose to repeal.

The numbers underneath are substantial. Yountville had committed $14 million from Measure S, a 2018 voter-approved hotel-tax increase earmarked for housing, to buy the site and run the planning. The full build was pegged at $40 million to $60 million, up to 150 units scaled back toward 120 over phases, with proposed rents from $1,500 for a studio to $2,800 for a two-bedroom. A first phase of about 40 units carried a $25.6 million estimate.

Not everyone shared Keller's read. "When I was a young cook, I would have killed for a studio," chef Douglas Keane of Cyrus told The San Francisco Standard.

The repeal returns the schoolyard to its prior land-use designation, but the state clock keeps running: Yountville must permit 72 units by 2031 to meet its housing target. Council member Pam Reeves told the meeting the town "must continue discussing and planning for the future of this town" — a conversation now starting again, on a site the town already owns.