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For This New Custom Wine Cellar in Orange County, It’s A Toast to Excellence!
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Our client for this custom wine cellar in orange county had a personal collection of 1000+ bottles so high capacity wine racks were a must.
The Orange County California Custom Wine Cellar Client Project
With California’s historic roots in farming, it’s not surprising that it is a haven for fine wine with over 800 wineries producing 90 % of all wines in the nation. Wine events are very common in this State.
This client of ours who lives in Orange County, California loves to entertain her friends and to hold regular dinner parties where sampling her new wines are part of the theme. Although she is a self-confessed wine geek she was only able to store a few wine bottles in her house since she didn’t have a real wine cellar, a place to store a significant wine collection.
The closest wine storage that our client had was about 20 miles from her house. As she built up her collection, she became frustrated by having to travel so far to access her wine collection. Ultimately she finally decided to take the plunge and convert a whole but poorly used room into a dedicated residential custom wine cellar.
We at Coastal Custom Wine Cellars were very happy and excited to partner with our client in transforming a simple room with a small closet into a fabulous wine cellar. As always, our goal was to meet our client’s storage needs, aesthetic tastes, and budgetary requirements.
To achieve these goals, Coastal Custom Wine Cellar designers incorporated both custom and semi-custom wine racks in designing unique wine storage racks with openings for 375 ml, 750 ml, and 1.5L bottles.
Initial Works: Insulating This Custom Wine Cellar in Orange County
The room we converted to a wine cellar was an extra room just beside the living area. It had its own door which was converted to a wine cellar door, and a medium-sized window which the owner had temporarily closed off.
Custom wine cellars in Orange County are built in different ways. This was during the 1st day of construction. It was all about taking the existing room out to make way for the new insulation and vapor barrier.
The 1st day of construction involved demolishing the walls and ceiling. The house did have some amount of insulation on the walls and ceiling but it wasn’t enough for a wine cellar. We also had to install a separate moisture barrier before the new insulation to keep water vapor from diffusing through the walls and into the cellar.
Another reason why they also had to tear down the walls was to make way for the new cooling unit. The home had some refrigeration lines that ran on the ceiling of the room (which were exposed during demolition), so the wine cellar’s cooling system was positioned on the wall instead.
After we ran the electrical and the insulation has set, we used drywall to finally seal the wall. Compared to regular wood, drywalls or green board are more moisture resistant so they’re perfect for wine cellars. After the edges have been mudded and sealed, it was time to paint the walls for the final canvass. Our client’s color of choice was pale yellow, a color that matched the rest of the house’s interiors. The home had a slightly contemporary style so we wanted to reflect that inside the cellar as well.
Our client, Leslie, was very hands on with the project. She was always there ready to talk us through what she wanted and helped make sure every detail was delivered the right way.
Features of this Orange County Custom Wine Cellar’s Wine Rack Design (Video Series)
Our client has a collection of over 2000 bottles of different vintages, sizes, and shapes. To create the wine cellar of her dreams, which accommodates 2772 bottles, we combined a line of custom (built from scratch) and semi-custom (already designed) wine racks incorporating features that she wanted to have in her wine room.
Though these racking styles were combined, they were built with the same height, depth, and thickness and without visual evidence of lesser quality. Semi-custom wine racks are more economical but have the same wood quality and craftsmanship as that of custom wine racks.
All the semi-custom wine racks were assembled in the owner’s garage before they were brought into the wine room. The client was very impressed that Coastal delivered the racks with photos and detailed instructions which made it very easy for the contractors to assemble them.
On the right side of the wall, we incorporated some custom components and modular storage at the bottom section of the wine rack. Openings were made for different-sized bottles. Small openings are for the splits of 375 ml bottles. To the left of that is the double deep column for double storage of magnum-sized or oversized champagne bottles. This section added depth and character to the room.
To the leftmost side, we added 7 columns with champagne-sized openings, which are 4″x4″ each. These openings were built for the Pax Syrah wines of our client, which the client thought would not fit on the standard 750 ml openings.
When the racks were assembled, the client was pleasantly surprised to find out that her large Syrah bottles did fit in the standard wine rack openings. But still, it’s good to have and offer a good mix of sizes. Below single bottle openings are bin cases for wooden case options, and bulk storage of various wines.
The top section of the wine rack on the left side of the wall came from the 8-foot semi-custom wine racks of Coastal which impressed the owner very much. Under it are single bottle storage racks which are 23 inches in depth which allow our Orange County client to put one bottle first and push it to the back and put another in front of it, allowing maximum storage capacity.
A high reveal display row just 40 inches above the finished floor was designed to display our client’s favorite vintages. To add elegance and dramatic effect, recessed can lights, and directional and LED ribbon lighting were placed just above the bottles.
This CAD drawing shows the high reveal display row in the middle, with single bottle storage above and double deep bottle storage below
This is another view of the high reveal display row. Notice above the row and to the right is the custom racking that has large openings for odd shaped bottles.
Custom wine cellars in Orange County may take several weeks to make, depending on the size and complexity of the design. This set up was done almost 2 months after demolition day.
On the back wall, we incorporated some more custom features to achieve our goal of maximizing the storage space of the Orange County wine cellar.
The top is single deep and the bottom section is double deep with a tabletop spanning the width of the wall. The table top was made of premium redwood and finished with a clear lacquer to protect the wood from spills.
All the wine racks were also made from Premium Redwood. Using this wood species is of great advantage for the client because of its beauty, affordability, durability, and resistance to decay.
Our custom wine cellars in Orange County, California are always fitted with the right wine cellar cooling unit. We choose wine cellar cooling units based on the cooling requirements of the wine cellar.
Premium Redwood as a wood species offers a variety of colors from white to pink to reddish brown making the premium redwood wine racks look very attractive. It is also non-aromatic quality which keeps your wines’ original taste and flavor.
Split Wine Room Cooling System
Without the proper wine cellar cooling system, proper aging of wines is impossible! Controlling the temperature and managing humidity levels in a wine cellar were two significant factors to consider. The Orange County California wine cooling unit is a split refrigeration system that does not create any fan noise or expel heat exhaust to an adjoining room in the house. It is clad in a wood grill box and cover and comes with a remote condenser placed outdoors and a fan coil inside.
The wood grill box is made from redwood like the wine racks and therefore blends in with the wine cellar. It makes the cellar more elegant and sophisticated. The Rack Cooler Series by US Cellars was chosen because it is perfectly designed to be installed on wine racks for maximum storage capacity.
Like our California Orange County client, you need not worry about having small selection of wines in your house for wine theme events or dinners. You can now start building your modern home wine cellar designed exactly to meet your storage needs and budget! At Coastal your each wine cellar is unique and guaranteed for long-time satisfaction.
About to Start Your Own Home Wine Room Project and Need Design Inspiration?
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In Conversation with The Owner of this Wine Cellar in Orange County, California
What Motivated the Owner to Start this Project?
Tim: Okay, Leslie, thanks very much for joining us today. What I’d like to do is ask you a few questions about your custom wine cellars in Orange County in particular. If I could start the conversation going by just asking you what was your original motivation in wanting to have a wine cellar? It is a significant investment, so I’m curious as to what made you go down this path and put one of these in your home.
Leslie: There are a few reasons. One of them is the closest decent wine store that I have is about 20 miles from my house, and I also travel quite a bit. An issue for me was I also love to entertain, and I go to a lot of wine dinners, so it was always a big issue for me when a wine dinner came up. If I couldn’t make the drive there and back, I was limited to the small selection of wine that I had at my house. Another part of it was that if I wanted to put together an event or something, I’d have to head down there to get wine for when I would entertain at the house.
Liquid Children
Ever since I put the cellar, it has been absolutely wonderful. I even forgot. I even had a to-do list – go to the wine cabinet to get wine – and realized – Holy heck! – my wine is downstairs. It was just fantastic to be able to – while getting wine for a trip that I’m going to be on this week – It’s nice to just walk downstairs and have all my liquid children at home.
Tim: Liquid children. It sounds like you’re quite a big entertainer then.
Leslie: You know, I’ve only had this house close to two years. I do live a little remotely, so I don’t have a lot of parties. I have a lot of wine friends based in Southern California, and having custom wine cellars in Orange County when you have fellow wine heads have a cellar is something that’s really great. I’m constantly doing wine events here, or I’m going to wine-themed dinners or putting together wine-themed dinners. When I’m not doing things here at the house, I do a lot of remote wine events as well when I travel all over the country. This weekend I’m going to be in New York, and we’re doing a wine dinner there. As long as the world doesn’t end on the 21st, we’re going to be having that dinner to celebrate on the 22nd.
Tim: When you travel somewhere else, would you source the wine locally where you are, or would you use your ready kind of store of wine and take it with you? How would that work?
Wine Cellar Construction Galleries – Custom Wine Cellars Orange County
Leslie: A little bit of each. The whole liquid on-plane thing has been a gargantuan bummer. Because if you have a stopover and you have a really nice bottle of wine, and you’re stopping over somewhere, and it is 80 degrees you’re really taking a chance you shouldn’t take. So a lot of times, if I’m doing the stopover, I might ship or FedEx my own personal wine there. I don’t know how to word this politely, but the people I hang with are an educated bunch, not saying that other people aren’t, but they know their wine. Usually, just walking into a store and being able to get a bottle of wine is not going to be of the same quality as the wines that other people are bringing.
Tim: It sounds like you’re clearly quite particular; what type of wines do you plan to stock your custom wine cellars with? What’s your process in terms of selecting wines? Do you have particular wines from different countries you like or different styles of wine? Give us a bit of a feel for that.
Leslie: I’m very big into California. I don’t do French much. I’m very scared to head down that slippery slope. Shiraz is the largest that I have in my cellar with Saxum. After Shiraz, it’s Cabernet, and Switchback’s my largest one there, and also, I’m a very big fan of German Rieslings.
Tim: Maybe what we could do is take a quick tour because I don’t think your cellar is 100% complete yet, but what you’ve done here on this page is you’ve uploaded a lot of pictures of the process and everything, which is really interesting. So maybe between you and Jerry, you could talk us through the different images. I’m guessing a good place to start might be with Jerry and the drawings. Would that be a good place?
Orange County Custom Wine Cellars Racking Design with a Tabletop and High-reveal Display Row
Wine Cellar Design Plan View
Jerry: What I initially received from Leslie was a floor plan with some dimensions, and we had a short conversation about how she wanted to manage, display, and store the wines. After our conversation with Leslie and learning about how she wanted to manage and store and display the wines and how many bottles she actually owned and needed to store, she shared with me the floor plan of the wine room, which we are looking at here now – the plan view or the overhead view.
She had a competitor’s drawing as well that I used as a guideline if you will. We went through probably three to four initial designs until we had it pinpointed down to the look that we wanted and confirmed all the dims from her contractor on site. We came up with a set of three-dimensional wine cellar design packages here. Subsequently, Leslie was nice enough to share with me some kind of cradle-to-grave type pictures where she started off, and I can expand all these pictures a little bit for you.
Tim: Let’s just touch briefly on them; you don’t need to go into a lot of detail.
Leslie: I do want to point out that I think it’s kind of fun because I look at these plans, and this wine room was never supposed to stay this way. The original plan was to take down an entire wall. I don’t even know if you know this, Jerry, but this cellar was supposed to be an entire wall of glass leading from my living room. So where you see the ending of wall A, if you go to the end of that wall and just draw a line to wall B, you’ll get what was supposed to be the original idea of my cellar, and the city shut me down because that wall where the mouse is at right now is a load bearing wall. Then I was going to take down the closet, and I was going to feed the closet which you see on the upper right-hand side, I was going to take down that wall. Well, that’s a load-bearing wall too. If you had told me two years ago that the room would look like this, I would have said, ‘Really? Well, what a bummer.’ But, in all honesty, it’s cheaper probably than having an entire wall of glass. I can store more bottles in it, and it looks just absolutely gorgeous.
Jerry: Yes, it really does, as you will see from the pictures. Just to finish up on the drawings here, there are eight drawings that consist of the floor plan or the overhead, several elevations of each particular wall, and some 3D wine cellar design visuals that I shared with Leslie about how the whole room would tie in together. We’re trying to stay within her window or budget, so we combined a line of semi-custom wine racks that are double deep to double the storage along the left side wall. We combined some custom features in as well so that we could achieve some of the features that she was trying to include in the wine room.
Combining Semi-custom Wine Racks with Full Custom Wine Racks
It’s just a combination of semi-custom wine racks as well as custom. Look at rack elevation A, that’s the right side wall. This is 100% custom, and essentially, it will give her the ability to store her 375 ml bottles (splits), some magnums (1.5 L), and even some champagne or oversized champagne bottles. Below that, on the bottom portion, will be storing wood cases, cardboard cases and bulk storage. That’s the elevation we were just discussing, which is the right side wall elevation A. It also has double deep features because, as you can see from this top left visual, the overhead view, there’s a little closet area that we’re utilizing a bit of by extending the racks double deep and into the closet.
Leslie: And then we’re going to go with modular. It’s kind of sneaky what we’re going to do. We’re going to go with modular storage below because then I could pull out those shelves, and then I need to use that back area to store a couple of wine boxes or what not. I do think it’s an important point to note that the racking, the size of the bottle opening, are very impressive. The bottles that I thought I was going to need to store in the champagne area, I’ve actually able to store in standard racking, which is just a wonderful thing.
Jerry: Yes, it really is. Those openings are 3 3/4 x 3 3/4 inches, so they’ll accommodate most of today’s market with a few exceptions.
Leslie: I have yet to find a bottle that doesn’t fit in those racks.
Jerry: Even a Charles Zinfandel will fit in there a little snugly. It’s rare that we utilize the champagne openings, but typically there are French champagnes like a Dom Perignon or just some really odd-shaped bottle that some of the wineries put out for marketing purposes only.
Leslie: It’s great.
Jerry: The left side wall which is labeled as B, that is here on this elevation – Elevation B – and these are the semi-custom wine racks. Even though we combined a semi-custom series with custom cellarage visually, and I’m sure Leslie can confirm this, they’re the same height, the same thickness, the same depths, and there’s really no visual evidence of a lesser quality because one being semi-custom versus custom. The semi-custom line is significantly less money, but the same quality wood and the same quality craftsmanship as well. She’s got on that particular wall double deep wine racks, for the most part, single bottle openings, well, actually a hundred percent single bottle openings. She has the high reveal display row that tilts the bottle to a 15-degree angle, approximately 40 inches above the finished floor. So that’s a great way to help her manage her wines because she can store like wines above and below the display area, and it also lends a
Wine Party to Celebrate Wine Geeks Custom Wine Cellar
Wine Cellar Lighting as Part of the Wine Cellar Construction
Leslie: We added rope wine cellar lighting to that, which just looks very, very pretty. And another thing I had to say about the racking because when we were putting together the racking kits, and I realized that the top was two separate kits, I was like, ‘Wow, I’m not sure if it’s going to look that good.’ You could see it in the plan that it had an additional detail up there and then it, goes away for the right side where you see where it says custom, and I said, ‘Wow, is this going to look good?’ It actually adds quite a bit of character to the room. It actually looks really cool.
Tim: We’ve got some pictures here, if I could figure out how to get to the pictures.
Leslie: Go to the left where it says Leslie Fisher house wine construction photos, click on wine cellar construction and then scroll all the way down to the bottom because that was the last day I took photos. I think it was on May 8th. And if you click on May 8th, that’ll give you all the photos that I took on May 8th that really show you the product as it stands right now.
Tim: I like the wine cellar lighting. It looks very nice.
Leslie: The first photo has no lights on in the room whatsoever, just the rope wine cellar lighting on. And then if you head here to this photo, that’s not full light, that’s just a minimal light. If you guys need it, I’d be more than happy to put all the lights on and take photos for you. That’s no problem at all.
Let’s Bring Your Custom Wine Cellar Dreams in Orange County to Reality!
At Coastal Custom Wine Cellars, we understand the importance of a well-designed and properly constructed wine storage space. Our team of experienced professionals is dedicated to transforming your vision into a reality, ensuring that your wines are not only stored securely but also showcased in a breathtakingly beautiful environment. We believe that every wine collector has unique preferences and requirements. That’s why we take a personalized approach to each project, working closely with our clients to understand their needs and aesthetic preferences. Our team will create a custom design that maximizes storage capacity, optimizes climate control, and reflects your individual style.
Our primary goal is your complete satisfaction. We prioritize open communication, transparency, and collaboration to ensure that your expectations are not only met but exceeded. Our team will work tirelessly to deliver a custom wine cellar in Orange County that surpasses your vision and provides years of enjoyment.
