Planning and designing custom wine rooms

Building a wine room

If you were thinking about having a wine room installed in your home but you thought that it you wouldn’t have enough room in your home, think again.

Wine rooms today are installed in as small as 50 sq ft of floor space. That’s right people are now installing wine rooms in spaces that are smaller than your average walk in closet.

If you are having your home renovated or are planning to have a custom home built you should think about having a wine room installed. They are a feature that helps raise the value of your home and can give your home that little piece of class that helps your home stand out from the rest.

Cooling the room

If you install a wine room in the basement of your home then you probably can get away with not having a cooling unit, if you are installing a wine room on the first or second floor of your home then you will need to invest in a wine cooling unit.
Wine cooling units range in price and size depending on how big of a room you are planning to cool. They can be as sophisticated as an air conditioner system that is independent of your furnace, to a wall unit that is like a window air conditioner that exhausts the hot humid air into a closet, hallway or to the outside.

Insulate

The one thing that is very important when constructing a wine room is to insulate the walls in your wine room. You want to limit the air movement in the room, the simplest way to do that is to use foam in the walls. You can use sheets of foam or have it spray foamed between the studs depending on how big an area you require to insulate. Wine rooms in basements are easier to cool and require less insulation, rooms on upper floors have to be protected from your home furnace and the sun light coming in from the windows. Remember heat rises so the higher the wine room is in the house the more heat and humidity it most repel.

Remember that the tighter the seal around the wine room the easier it is to keep the room cool and your wine at the proper temperature.

Never run furnace ductwork into a wine room, even if they have the ability to be dampened, the risk of overheating the wine is too much of a risk.

Finishing’s

Most wine rooms have tiled floors and wood walls. There are certain types of wood you should only use in wine rooms. You should have your contractor check into which ones are expectable to be within contact of wine, the wrong wood can have an adverse affect on the quality and taste of the wine that you are storing. Wine stored over long periods of time will change in taste depending on the wood that it is in contact with, so choose your wood wisely.

When lighting a wine room you need to take into consideration that normal lights give off heat. You need to purchase lights and fixtures that do not heat up. This will help keep the wine room at a cooler temperature.
You should try to buy LED bulbs; they give off a lot of light while not giving off the heat. Adding dimmers or coloured lighting can help set the mood, this works extremely well at night when guests view your wine room through the glass door.

Racking

Racking also comes in a wide variety, you can have custom made wood racking of your choice or you can keep it relatively simple with pre made metal racking. It depends on the look and feel that you are trying to create. The only restricting your chooses in racking is your budget. The racking when custom made from certain materials can cost more than they entire construction of the room.

Remember that the reason that you are building this room is so that you can have a place to store and display your wine. So don’t clutter the room with too much stuff. A simple picture or two is all a finely designed wine room requires to help bring it all together.

The door

The final piece to any good wine room is a glass door at the entrance. This is the easiest way to allow people to look at your beautiful wine room without having to walk in. If you are in a home where you believe that it will be difficult to keep the room cool then you will have to spend some money on a well built glass door.
The door must have a proper seal on it, the door basically has to function as an exterior door, and it will be dividing two completely different climates from each other well still in your home.

Rob Abbott
Operations Manager
Village Builders Inc.