The Inspiration

While traveling in Australia, a client of mine, fell in love with the unusual way a restaurant displayed its floor to ceiling wine collection. Their idea was imaginative, so I can’t take all the credit for the design, but I will say that I pushed  their concept a little further and provided my client with some additional benefits.

The Wine Cabinet Layout

The space I had to work with was a perfect 10 feet tall and 10 feet wide, but instead of duplicating a stationary wall, I created a series of doors and drawers out of black walnut for hiding all sorts of things.

If standing in front of the piece, I hid two wine fridges in the bottom left and right corners behind walnut panels. In the center was a stack of storage drawers. Above, I created four large cabinet doors for displaying my client’s wine selection. Each door was massive and quite heavy.  In order to keep them from falling off in the middle of the night, I went the extra mile and hid steel plates in the doors and the cabinet’s structure so the hinges would be tapping into metal versus wood.  Fifteen years have now passed and I haven’t heard a peep, so I think it’s realistic to assume that this was a successful strategy.

Peeking behind each door, one finds an interior of maple with plenty of storage for all sorts of things: wine glasses, dishes, serving platters, etc. The entire project was built and finished in Beacon, NY and then driven to Jersey City, NJ for installation. After two days of work, the cabinet was secured in place using two strips of crown molding. Now the piece kinda looks like it was installed shortly after the townhouse was built.

The client was very happy with the results and so was I.