Right now, the site of the future Kentucky Owl Park is, literally, a hole in the ground; it takes some imagination to picture it as a nirvana of whiskey. But the plan also fits neatly within the overall trajectory of the Kentucky bourbon industry — a half-dozen distilleries lie within a few minutes’ drive, and all of them are building amenities like restaurants, visitors centers, parks and hotels to cater to a new class of whiskey tourist.

The typical distillery was once a utilitarian industrial plant; now it’s a boozy theme park. The recently opened Castle and Key Distillery outside Frankfort, Ky., which took over a defunct distillery site modeled after a medieval castle, sports a botanical trail and a manicured garden. The centerpiece of the new Bardstown Bourbon Company distillery is Bottle & Bond, a minimalist-chic restaurant run by the former chef at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. Upping the ante, SPI Group hired Shigeru Ban, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect, to design the main buildings at Kentucky Owl Park.

For local business leaders, such changes promise to turn the region into something like a Napa Valley of whiskey, a place that combines high-end retailing, resort hotels, fine dining and, flowing through it all, an unending river of tourist dollars.

“We don’t want it to be just an industry; we want it to be a destination,” said Kim Huston, the president of the Bardstown Industrial Development Corporation. Ms. Huston takes the Napa comparison seriously: She travels frequently to Northern California to study how its most famous wine region went from a sleepy agricultural community in the 1980s to being a synonym for high-end living.

“We’re probably where they were 20 years ago,” she said. “Our goal is for Bardstown to play on the world stage of luxury tourism.”

Not everyone in the region is on board with these plans. Kentucky is significantly more traditional and rural than a place like Napa, and even deep-pocketed companies like Beam Suntory can’t easily push around social conservatives who bristle at the thought of turning their towns over to tourists, no matter how much money the visitors bring in.

But the skeptics might not be able to hold out for long. Bourbon fans are already streaming into the state — 1.2 million people visited its distilleries in 2017, a 20 percent jump from 2016 and almost double the number in 2014, according to the Kentucky Distillers Association.