PROCESSED VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

See the video version of this page, Building Incredible Under Stair Wine Cellars in Denver Homes. You can also read the website version, here.

What we did here is we took an under-stair space that the clients just really wanted to maximize they really love their wine they just wanted to have something that was kind of a showpiece for them. They do a lot of entertaining and they’ve got some really good wines and they’re really on their way to actually filling it up they’re about 40 full right now as you can see here custom dual pane glass really seals in the cool air. Under stair, spaces tend to be a little more difficult with the cooling aspect of it because we can’t really hide them as well so as you can see here what we did is we have a commercial cooling unit that is tucked behind a custom grill space so it just really looks like it grew there and then everything here is just custom stained oak and just built to their specifications. They’ve now gone to personalizing it lots of display cases they have room for their magnums in that area and then on the end cap there is just a really cool way to kind of display some wine to everybody but we’re really super pleased with how this came out and obviously, the clients absolutely love it this is a commercial RM system. So this is a split system, so the split system is rack-mounted and then you’ve got the condenser that is on right on the side yard so we’ve run our lines through their garages on the other side and out to the side yard

Designing an Under Stair Glass Wine Cellar

Every job obviously starts with an inspiration or a space that they’re wanting to go through. The first thing I like to ask people is what is your-do you have any inspiration pics because most people once they get to us they typically thought about it quite a bit, you know. They’ve done the Pinterest, they’ve gone to our website you know, or even other people’s websites, and they’ve found kind of what they like you know, so I would say 9 out of ten times most of the people say, “oh this is what I like” and they present us with something, and then we basically take that and then we kind of springboard from there and kind of give them what they want you to know. Once again that goes back into the discussions of all of the different elements and if it’s wood which in this case it was all of the different elements you know that they’ve seen in their inspiration picks and putting them into their design and even you know maybe even trying to introduce other elements that they haven’t necessarily thought about. They have an under stair space, they contacted us, we came out, they basically told us what their rough measurements were you know and we were able to kind of gauge what the layout was going to be and then kind of- at the first thing I like to do is I kind of like to give people ballpark budgets of what things are cost because there are a lot of people that really don’t have concepts of what building a refrigerated wine cellar truly is you know and I always like to remind people you’re basically building a very large refrigerator so they’re not inexpensive you know so in this case, once we kind of decided that the budget was where they wanted to be and then I started to show them some different kinds of cellars that we have done and basically what we like to do is we like to clue in on a lot of the different elements within a wood- that’s the other aspect is we’ve we included that they wanted wood cellar so we try and find out what their eyes visually like within their cellar, in this case, they didn’t like diamond racking but they did like having bottles displayed. There’s this combination of volume versus display in this case you know we decided like having an open- we, I love doing open spaces in the middle of just because it gives you- as you can see here what they did is they displayed some of their stuff that has meaning to them decanters you know it ranges you know. So once we got all of the design aspects of it down then it was just a matter of putting it into production and in the meantime we had to deal with all of the cooling aspects of it and so with an under-stair space, cooling it can be a little bit of a challenge because there’s usually no place to put to hide a cooler. So in this case our cooling design you know we had to basically build our racking around the cooler. Part of what we do is we do everything related to a cellar I mean we do all of the insulation because that’s a huge component of building a cellar is you it has to be fully insulated, otherwise, it’s just not going to work properly you know it’s going to cost you money so dual pane insulated glass in metal frames that’s pretty much a must for any cellar, closed-cell spray foam behind the walls install the cooling system install the racking and that’s where we are today. All of our cooling systems are installed by licensed HVAC technicians that focus only on cooling you know on wine cellars because wine cellars are a completely different beast than a regular traditional HVAC system you know.

Average Time Frame of Completion for an Under Stair Wine Cellar

Interestingly, right now the wood cellars are taking a lot longer just because- these are all custom-made by really awesome craftsman cabinet makers. For just the racking right now we’re at probably about 10 to 12 weeks for that you know, probably two years ago that number was probably more like six to eight weeks you know but obviously current times everybody is extremely busy but so that typically is the well that’s where we’re at right now. In that time we can usually get a lot of the other things done you know so there might be an additional two weeks on top of that week two weeks depending to actually do final get everything finalized. Installs maybe you take two days you know we basically do everything to piece them in there and then our craftsmen come in and they do all the finishing touches too that need to be you know that’s- because the racking is definitely not a just slide it in there sort of a thing you know I mean they come in component pieces that have to be reassembled.

Recommended Wood Material in a Wine Cellar

First of all the wood, it’s- okay what kind of wood do you really want – do you want a more hardwood you want something maybe that is maybe a little bit more on the cost-efficient side. If somebody is having a really dark finished stain that they ultimately want, I don’t necessarily recommend them going with higher-end woods because you’re going to be doing a dark stain anyways. If you’re doing a lighter stain where you’re going to see more of the natural wood elements to it then yeah you probably would want to go with the higher-end oak walnut, something like that.

Recommended Cooling System Maintenance for an Under Stair Wine Cellar

Minimum of a year, yearly they do need to be maintained we always build our cellar such that we’re cognizant of maintenance when we do it in fact with this cellar the wood grill pulls off so you can easily get inside to do maintenance on that. We don’t typically do anything with the flooring we leave that up to the client and their contractor whatever they want to do. As for the lighting, we do LED lighting in our racks- I mean once again this is going to be all dependent on the type of racking system that we use but when we’re talking about wood, there are a few different areas that you can put led lighting. We always put led lighting on that high reveal or the angle- that’s a great area to put led lighting, in the open areas, but it’s really tough to do anything with the single bottle, neck out or the diamond racking or any of those you just can’t it just doesn’t let itself to putting led lighting. Thank you for taking this walkthrough on our under the stair cellar that we’re super proud of.