Bespoke Wine Room Cabinetry

A wine room is usually built around racking, but it rarely stops there. Once the bottles have somewhere to live, most households want somewhere to taste, somewhere to keep glassware and accessories, and a finished, considered space rather than a room of shelving. That is where cabinetry comes in, and it is where we spend most of our design time.

A tasting counter gives the room a purpose beyond storage — somewhere to open a bottle, decant, or simply set down glasses while deciding what to drink. We size these to the room, in materials that can take the odd spill without lasting damage, and position them so they don't interrupt the flow between racking and doorway.

Cupboards below or beside racking hold the things a wine room accumulates over time: spare glassware, decanters, corkscrews, tasting notes, the occasional case still in its original box. We plan this storage properly rather than leaving it as an afterthought squeezed beneath the racking once everything else has been fitted.

Glazed doors do two jobs at once. They let a wine collection be seen — which for many collectors is half the point of a dedicated room — while still offering a degree of protection and, where the room includes cooling equipment installed by others, a defined boundary for that conditioned space. We detail glazing and door seals to work with whatever cooling system is specified, rather than treating them as purely decorative.

Joinery around racking is the detail that separates a considered wine room from a room with shelving bolted to the wall. Racking rarely runs wall-to-wall in a single continuous unit; there are usually corners, half-height sections, or gaps around structural features that need proper joinery to resolve. We design cabinetry as the frame that racking sits within, rather than leaving those junctions unfinished.

Lighting within cabinetry — above a counter, inside a glazed cupboard, along the underside of a shelf — gives the room the kind of depth that a single overhead light cannot achieve on its own. We coordinate this with any wider lighting scheme for the room, keeping levels appropriate for a space that may also be holding bottles sensitive to heat and light.

Every wine room we build is different, largely because bottle counts, room shapes and how a household actually uses the space vary so much. Some rooms are almost entirely racking with a small counter tucked into a corner; others are built around a generous tasting area with racking as a backdrop. We design toward whichever balance suits the room and the collection.

The result, in either case, is cabinetry that reads as a single considered scheme rather than racking with furniture added around it later.

Part of our wine rooms & cellars collection