Custom Wine Cellars San Francisco, led by Michael Vecchia, has been at the forefront of wine cellar innovation for years, including state-of-the-art wine cellar doors. We take care of everything from planning to liaising with partner suppliers, constructing the cellar, and transporting your wine collection to its new home. For this story, we want to share with you the thought process behind this North Beach home’s custom wine cellar door! Hopefully, at the end of this article, you’ll have a good idea of what it’s like to plan and design a great-looking, well-functioning contemporary wine cellar door!
Professionally-Made Wine Cellars Doors for Custom Wine Cellars
When you come across a wine cellar, what do you primarily see? In most cases, it’s the wine cellar door, right? It’s the primary entryway into an absolutely unique world of aging wines, and it’s the “transition line” between your cellar’s aesthetics and the rest of the home’s.
You might ask, what are the benefits of a wine cellar door? What makes it a critical component of any wine cellar and why does it deserve to be a topic of focus here? Well, as an experienced custom wine cellar builder, here’s why we think wine cellar doors are highly valuable:
- PROVIDE ADDITIONAL INSULATION
For wine cellars, the right amount of insulation is a must. From our experience, plenty of the wine cellars we’ve renovated or repaired were because the insulation was not set up properly. In some cases where the original contractor did put in the right amount of spray foam on the walls, there was a problem with the air gaps that existed between the door and the jamb — they weren’t prevented!
Wine room doors are specifically-made for wine cellars such that the edges are weather-proofed, the wood components are treated to be less porous, and the glass components are tempered. When these doors are manufactured and installed correctly, they can significantly improve a wine cellar’s insulation.
- HELP REGULATE THE LIGHT THAT ENTERS YOUR WINE CELLAR
What makes wines appear dark are mostly the tannins found in them. Tannins contain beneficial antioxidants, but it’s one of the most light-sensitive components of a wine. Try leaving a bottle of wine out in the sun for a day and taste how the flavor changes at the end of it; you’ll most likely experience flavors that are odd, weird, or just different. That’s what we call a light-struck taste in general, and it is primarily because of the change in the composition of tannins.
You might be wondering what a wine cellar door has to do with this. Well, like wine cellar walls, doors help control the light that reaches your wine. Your wine cellar door’s design then would depend on the location of your wine cellar and its position relative to natural light sources.
Say, for example, you want a glass wine cellar that’s located in your San Francisco living room lined with floor-to-ceiling glass windows; we’d probably recommend getting tinted glass doors for it.
- SECOND LINE OF DEFENSE WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR COLLECTION’S SECURITY
Wine storage room doors nowadays are built with advanced security features. Intelligent lock systems, digital num pads, or biometric scanners are integrated in place of traditional locks and doorknobs. Getting a custom wine cellar door with these features can help protect your expensive and precious collection.
- PROVIDE THE “FIRST IMPRESSION”
If you’re fond of hosting parties and entertaining guests in your North Beach home and you’ve got an entire wine room surrounded by concrete or wooden walls, your wine cellar doors will be the first feature that your guests will notice. Whether you want a traditional wooden wine cellar door or a modern wine cellar, you can have it customized according to the look you want. For example, you can have the glass etched or have wrought iron doors. At Coastal Custom Wine Cellars, we can help produce your desired design!
Wine Cellar Door Glass Paneling for Easy Viewing
Moving forward with a more precise example, the wine cellar we want to share with you in this article had a simple-looking arched wine cellar door. It has wooden framing with a glass panel at the center, allowing people to take a glimpse of the beautifully done, custom wooden wine cellar racks and, of course, the collection.
The glass panel didn’t have any etching or carving on it, but it was tempered glass. We always use tempered glass for all our glass paneling because it does not fog up and prevents moisture from forming inside the cellar, no matter how hot the weather can get outside.
Steve Pantalemon, our wine cellar design senior consultant, recommends that glass panels should be at least ½” thick. But again, we will need to conduct a thorough assessment to determine the right thickness of your glass door to ensure your wine cellar is well protected!
Incredible Technique for Wooden Door Framing
To frame the glass panel, we went for a dark-stained, knotty alder wood frame with an arch on top. The arch was a design feature to tie it up to the large, arched french windows in the living room. Contrary to what others may think, the wooden part is not your ordinary wooden framing. It is laminated veneer lumber (LVL) wherein we stacked multiple sheets of knotty Alder wood with a strong adhesive to produce the entire frame (yes, it is a type of engineered wood!). Compared to natural wood, engineered LVL is known to be more durable, smooth, and consistent.
In between the wooden wine cellar door frame and door jamb is a Q-Lon Seal. It is one of many ways to minimize air gaps that could potentially be detrimental to the wine cellar’s temperature and humidity.
At the bottom of the door, we also built automatic door locks that seal the bottom as soon as you close the door. This prevents cold air from escaping in that part. These “guillotine locks” completely seal the gap so that when you try to slide a thin piece of paper in, it doesn’t go through!
We custom-made this wine cellar door with the help of our partners at IronWine Cellars, one of the industry’s most trusted wine cellar rack and door manufacturer. Custom Wine Cellars San Francisco is proud to have reliable partners to create one-of-a-kind wine cellars and you can trust that our workmanship is unlike any other.
Outstandingly-Built Wine Cellar Doors That Boost Your Wine Cellars’ Value
When you want to maximize the cost of your wine cellar, going for cost-effective approaches and innovations will ensure you get what you pay for and more. A wine cellar door may seem small and insignificant to the overall functioning of your wine cellar at first, but it’s utterly the opposite! Imagine losing thousands of dollars from spoilt wine just because the wine cellar door was overlooked — that’s an expensive, expensive disaster.
Avoid the risks of condensation and large amounts of light in your San Francisco wine cellar. Get in touch with the experts at Custom Wine Cellars San Francisco and we will provide you with a 3D design of your own personal wine cellar!
We serve the entire North Beach community and other areas like Irvine, Presidio Heights, Russian Hill, Treasure Island and more. We are always excited about custom-making wine cellar doors, but if you only need the pre-fabricated ones, we can also show you options too! Call us today at +1 (415) 508 – 8419, and let’s make your doors more wine cellar appropriate!
