Wine Room | Design Tips

A wine room is the perfect addition for wine lovers and keen entertainers alike. Gone are the days where a wine cellar is a necessity for wine connoisseurs. If you don’t have the luxury of space, a wine room can be just as effective and far more accessible than a wine cellar, not to mention is far easier to design and build than a cellar. Here’s a few things to consider…

Whilst a wine room can be specified with any of our wood finishes, a darker finish is almost always chosen as it provides a really lovely finish for a truly luxurious space. Portobello oak and Berkeley oak in particular create a warm, timeless look that works so well as part of a wine room design.

The first thing we would need to know before embarking on the design of a wine room is if the client is looking for it to be passive or active. ‘Passive’ is essentially a room, or part of a room with wine cabinetry that is not temperature controlled i.e. the wine is stored at room temperature (whatever that may be). ‘Active’ is a thermostatically controlled room to ensure wine being kept for long periods of time are kept at optimum temperature.

If you are considering long term storage then sunlight, temperature and vibration are all the enemies of optimum wine storage. A sudden alteration in temperature for example can be extremely damaging and needs to be kept stable at around 8°c to 13°c and kept out of direct sunlight if possible. Vibrations can disturb the sediment present in the bottles and can also cause complex chemical reactions which are far less visible.

If you are considering bottle slots, try to think about the type of bottle you’d like to store and where as Champagne bottles are bigger than a standard 70cl bottle of red wine for example. Most clients opt for a display shelf which can be designed at a lower angle which allows for bottles to lay back more. This keeps the wine touching the cork which is perfect if you wish to store your most revered bottles long term.

We recommend that you try to reduce or only allow minimal movement around the wine. A great place for wine for example is out of the way in a formal dining room or off the main kitchen in areas with less traffic in the home. If however short term storage is the aim, an open wine room will be suitable.

A mixture of storage is a lovely way to break up the density in a wine room, we recommend incorporating individual bottle storage, x-frame wine storage and open storage for cases, wine coolers etc below. If a client specifies open shelving beneath the wine racks, we consider what is to be stored on them. This is due to the fact that not all cases of wine are the same size, and if the shelving height is too low it will not fit. The same goes for hampers, wine buckets etc – so this is something small but very much worth considering. You may of course prefer to unpack your cases and have spare wine etc hidden away in deep drawers – whatever works for you.

With all this in mind – not every kitchen/ dining room has space for a wine room. When this is the case, an under-counter wine cooler which can hold around 40-45 bottles or perhaps a tall wine storage which can hold around 80-95 bottles depending on the type and brand. The best wine storage is by Gaggenau, Miele or Subzero.