Bespoke Wine Cellar Racking

A cellar is usually the one room in the house given over entirely to storage, which means racking has to work harder here than almost anywhere else. High-capacity layouts, floor-to-ceiling runs and genuine organisation matter more in a cellar than in a small wine cupboard upstairs, because the collections kept in cellars tend to be larger and held for longer.

Capacity is the starting point for almost every cellar project. We work out how many bottles the room needs to hold, both now and with reasonable room for growth, and use that figure to decide between denser open racking and more generous individual compartments. Cellars often have irregular floor plans — vaulted ceilings, supporting piers, sloped floors — so capacity planning has to work around the room's actual geometry rather than a theoretical rectangle.

Accessible organisation is what separates a well-run cellar from a room where nobody can find anything. We plan zones by wine type, region or maturation stage depending on how you actually think about your collection, and keep frequently accessed bottles within easy reach while longer-term storage can sit in less convenient corners or higher runs.

Floor-to-ceiling use matters in a cellar specifically because ceiling heights are often lower than the rest of the house, so every centimetre of available height needs to be put to work. We design racking to run the full height of the room wherever structurally sensible, with secure access to higher sections built in rather than left as an afterthought.

Larger bottle formats — magnums, double magnums and beyond — are common in serious cellars and need dedicated sections sized to their dimensions rather than being squeezed into standard-bottle spacing. We plan these zones early, since they take up disproportionately more space than the bottle count alone would suggest.

Display zones give a cellar somewhere to show off particular bottles rather than treating the whole room as undifferentiated storage. A lit, open section at eye level, or a small feature run near the entrance, gives visitors something to look at without compromising the working efficiency of the racking behind it.

Architectural integration is particularly important in a cellar, since these rooms often have existing brick or stone vaulting, structural columns or uneven walls that a generic racking system simply cannot accommodate. We survey the room's actual structure and build racking that respects it, rather than asking the room to conform to a standard module.

Where a cellar includes cooling equipment, we design racking and access clearly around it, keeping racking distinct from the mechanical side of the room: our work is the joinery and metalwork holding the bottles, while temperature and humidity control is specified and installed by a climate-control specialist working to their own requirements.

Part of our wine rooms & cellars collection