The Napa Valley Opera House was designed by the architectural firm of Newsom & Newsom in the Italianate style.

G.W. Crowley opened his newly constructed opera house in January 1880 with a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore. For the next twenty-six years, the theater hosted vaudeville, concerts, light opera, meetings, and graduations. But after the 1906 earthquake, movies began inexorably to replace live entertainment, and the Opera House went out of business in 1914.

In 1985, Robert Mondavi and Margrit Biever Mondavi assisted in the formation of a nonprofit organization to restore and manage the theater which reopened in 2003. Once again the Napa Valley Opera House offers seasons of classical and popular music.