Bespoke Drinks Cabinets in Birmingham

Birmingham's Victorian and Edwardian terraces tend to hand a designer two fixed alcoves either side of a chimney breast, and a drinks cabinet often makes better use of one of those recesses than a bookcase or a plain cupboard ever could. Built to the alcove's exact width and height, the cabinet reads as part of the original room rather than an addition, holding bottles and glassware behind doors that match the skirting and architrave already in place. This is different from a home bar, which is a larger, fixed installation usually built with its own servery surface; a cabinet stays compact enough to sit within existing joinery without reshaping the room around it.

Where a rear extension or a loft conversion has created a new open-plan space, the cabinet can instead stand as a freestanding piece or form part of a run of cabinetry alongside a media wall, positioned near where people actually gather rather than against a wall nobody passes. Bottle storage is planned on drawings before the interior is built, with shelving spaced for the mix of spirits, wine and mixers a household keeps, so tall bottles are not forced onto a shelf built for something shorter.

Glassware needs its own consideration, since a household with a mixed collection of tumblers, wine glasses and coupes will need more than a single generic shelf. We measure the actual glasses against the design before committing to fixed racking, and a mirrored or antiqued glass back adds depth to a shallow cabinet, particularly useful in a Birmingham terrace where a chimney breast alcove is rarely very wide.

A stone or timber surface, set into the cabinet top or on a pull-out shelf, gives a small area for mixing a drink without taking over the kitchen worktop, which matters in an open-plan renovation where the kitchen is doing several jobs at once. Where a household wants provision for a small drinks fridge, we build the cabinet to the dimensions of that unit, including the ventilation space it needs, with the fridge itself sourced and supplied separately.

Apartments in Birmingham's converted mill buildings and newer developments often call for a smaller cabinet still, sometimes no wider than a single alcove door, and the same care over layout applies at that scale: the fewer bottles and glasses the piece holds, the more the shelf spacing needs to be right first time.