Private cellars · Restaurants · Vaulted conversions
A beautiful cellar that swings four degrees between February and August will age a collection badly, and no amount of walnut racking compensates for that. The physics comes first: insulation, a vapour barrier on the correct side, a cooling system sized for the real heat load, and humidity that keeps corks alive without growing mould on labels. Once that is settled we design the room properly — racking sized for the bottles you actually own, light that does no harm and a place to open something.
About us
The studio was founded by a refrigeration engineer who spent twenty years on industrial cold rooms and married into a family with a small vineyard and a very badly built cellar. Watching good bottles cook slowly under a house that had been insulated on the wrong side of the wall was an education in what the trade gets wrong. He was joined by an interior architect who had been designing cellars for clients and quietly worrying that nobody was checking the numbers behind them.
That combination is the whole point of the practice. Most cellars are built either by a joiner who makes lovely racking and treats climate as an appliance to be plugged in afterwards, or by a refrigeration firm who install a unit into a room that leaks vapour through every surface. Both produce failures that surface two or three years later, by which time nobody accepts responsibility. We do the calculation and the cabinetry, so there is one party to answer for either.
We work on cellars of forty bottles and of forty thousand, in apartments, villas, restaurants and the vaulted undercrofts of buildings several centuries old, where the challenge is doing all of this without damaging fabric that is protected. Every project ends with monitoring installed and a year of data reviewed with the client, because the only honest proof that a cellar works is a temperature graph across a full summer.
Advantages
Six things that decide whether your wine is still improving in fifteen years.
Wine tolerates a cellar at fourteen degrees far better than one that oscillates between eleven and sixteen across the year, because every swing pushes wine past the cork and draws air back in. We design for the smallest achievable annual variation rather than for a number on a display, using thermal mass, insulation and a system that runs gently and often instead of fiercely and rarely. The graph after twelve months is what we ask to be judged on.
This single detail causes more failed cellars than anything else. A cellar is cold and humid inside a warm dry building, so the barrier belongs on the outside of the insulation, and getting it backwards drives condensation into the structure where it rots timber and destroys plaster invisibly. We detail every junction, penetration and doorway, seal them properly, and photograph the build-up before it is covered so there is a record of what is behind the wall.
Heat load depends on wall build-ups, surrounding room temperatures, door use, lighting and how many warm bottles arrive at once, and an oversized unit is as damaging as an undersized one: it short-cycles, strips humidity and produces exactly the swings we are trying to eliminate. We calculate the load, select equipment that modulates, place the evaporator where air moves through the racking, and plan where the heat goes so a neighbour is not left with a fan outside their window.
Below about sixty per cent corks dry out and shoulders drop; above about seventy-five, labels foxes and mould appears on cases. Ordinary cooling equipment dehumidifies as a side effect, so an unmanaged cellar drifts dry no matter how good the box is. We specify systems with humidity control, add passive moisture sources where appropriate, and monitor in several places, since a cellar with a two-metre rack has a different climate at the floor than at the ceiling.
Standard bays are designed for standard bottles, and a serious collection is not standard: burgundy shoulders, champagne, magnums, half bottles, wooden cases that need shelf depth and clearance. We audit what you own and what you buy each year, then size bays accordingly, leave real growth capacity, and build in a way that lets the layout change later. Air must pass through the racking rather than around it, which is a structural decision, not a styling one.
Every cellar leaves with sensors logging temperature and humidity and alerting to a phone if either drifts, because the failure that ruins a collection is the one nobody notices for three weeks in August. We review the first year's data with the client, adjust the settings against real behaviour rather than assumptions, and service the equipment annually. Cellars we built a decade ago are still on that schedule, which is how we know the details hold.
Services
Feasibility and design, full construction, climate systems, racking and joinery, historic conversions, service and rescue work.
An assessment of the space you have in mind — a cellar, a garage corner, an understairs void, a whole floor — covering heat load, moisture, access, structure, drainage and where equipment can realistically sit and vent. You receive drawings, a capacity figure in bottles by format, a climate strategy and a cost range before committing to anything. Frequently the honest answer is that a different room in the house would be far cheaper to make work.
Full build from an empty space: insulation, vapour barrier, sealed doors with proper thresholds, floors that can take the loaded weight, drainage, electrics, lighting and finishes, followed by climate equipment and racking. One team, one contract and one party responsible, with the concealed build-up photographed at every stage. Projects usually run between four and ten weeks, and we work around occupied houses rather than through them.
Cooling and humidity equipment specified from a calculated heat load, in through-wall, split and ducted forms depending on where the heat can go and how much noise is acceptable in the room next door. We retrofit into existing cellars, which usually means correcting the insulation and vapour barrier first, and we are willing to say when a room simply cannot be made stable and the sensible answer is a smaller, better-built enclosure inside it.
Racking made to measure in oak, walnut, steel or a combination, with bays sized to the formats you own, case storage at floor level, display bins, drawers for accessories and integrated ladders in tall rooms. Where the space allows we design tasting areas with a table at the right height, seating, glass storage and lighting warm enough to read a label without heating the room, plus glazing that lets a cellar be seen without letting summer in.
Old vaulted undercrofts are the best cellars in existence and the most easily ruined, because sealing a breathing stone vault with modern materials traps water in the structure. We work with lime plasters and vapour-open build-ups, insulate reversibly where it is needed at all, place equipment so nothing is cut into historic fabric, and handle the consents. Frequently these rooms need very little cooling and simply need to stop being ventilated to the outside air.
Annual servicing of cooling equipment, sensor calibration, alarm testing and a written report on the year's climate data, for cellars we built and for those we did not. We are also called to diagnose cellars that never worked: condensation running down a wall, humidity at ninety per cent, a unit that has short-cycled since installation. The diagnosis is honest, including the occasions when the previous installer got it right and the client's expectations were wrong.
Contacts
Send photographs of the space, its dimensions, what is above and below it, and roughly how many bottles you hold and buy each year. We can give a realistic capacity and a cost range from that before anybody travels. Existing cellars with a problem should include a temperature log if you have one.
We work across the north and centre of the country, and further for larger projects.