Burlingame CA Wooden Wine Racking Ideas for Your Cellar

For a wine collector, there’s no place like an expertly-planned, professionally-designed home wine cellar for your most beloved wines. When you have a collection that screams “priceless,” you’d want to keep them inside a reliable climate-controlled wine cellar that looks pleasing and does not get impaired as easy and fast. If you’re searching for ideas on wooden wine racking, doors, and lights for your soon-to-be traditional wine cellar, this article is for you!

The moment you walk towards this wine cellar, you’ll immediately see almost the entire collection distributed throughout the amazing custom wooden wine rack.

A European-themed Home Owned by an Avid Wine Enthusiast

Coastal Custom Wine Cellars has built dozens of wine cellars, and this one stands out as a fairly simple yet striking wooden wine cellar inside a home. When we and our partners made this walk-in wine room, the house was newly constructed, so the team had plenty of space to build the cellar from the ground up.

Custom wine cellar builders always ensure the cellar looks akin to the home’s interior. Every home and home wine cellar owner has a unique personality, and we also want the wine cellar to manifest the same character and style. Since this Burlingame home was patterned from the sunny, breezy feels of the Tuscan countryside, the team also wanted this rustic wine cellar design to feel as natural as possible; Hence, the decision to use hardwood for the wine racking and natural stone tiles for the flooring.

Apart from aesthetic purposes, natural stone tiles (like Terracotta) are known to have mold and bacteria-resistant properties when placed in a controlled environment, making them perfect for a wine cellar.

There’s a Place for Everything Inside this Cellar’s Custom Wooden Wine Racking

Wooden wine racking may look dense and space-consuming, but they provide plenty of benefits, especially when customizing them. These include being able to:

Maximize the storage capacity of your wine cellar
enhance the look of your cellar even without other adornments
Create particular areas for special wines in your collection
Improve the functionality of your cellar by being able to position the racks strategically relative to the air conditioning, door, and electrical components.

Let’s look at how this Burlingame home wine cellar’s wooden wine racks turned out.

Diversifying wine storage styles makes the racking look more interesting. Take a look at this home wine cellar we did in another home with varying storage configurations! — This cellar’s wooden wine shelves were designed and handcrafted with precision and utmost regard for the owner’s needs and preferences.

Well-Curated Combination of Storage Compartments

Compared to wine rack kits or pre-assembled wine racks, custom-built wine racks give you the freedom to decide how you want them to look. If you’re not into design, don’t worry. Custom Wine Cellars San Francisco has a great team of consultants who will help you visualize your cellar better with 3D drawings and help you brainstorm unique design ideas that present your wines in the best way possible.

This particular homeowner had a variety of drinks in his collection, from standard-sized wine bottles to more than 1500ml. Moreover, he had a few stemwares and decanting tools in his possession which he wanted to store inside the cellar. To accommodate all of these and the wines he may wish to collect in the future, we went for a custom wooden wine rack design with a diverse set of partitions.

If you brush through our gallery, you can see the following compartment styles:

Diamond bins
Horizontal racks for standard bottles
Horizontal racks for magnum bottles
Cubbies for wine crates
High-Reveal shelves
Three and three-fourth-sized (3 ¾) single cubicles for 750s, champagnes, and burgundies
Drawers and cabinets with sub-closing hinges
Under-counter wine glass racks
Decanting area

Despite the mix of storage styles, the entire rack didn’t look cluttered overall and actually became the statement piece of the entire cellar! This floor-to-ceiling wine rack could hold about 900 750ml bottles and 16 magnums, not including the cabinets and cubbies!

Odorless Wooden Wine Racking Finish

Apart from the placement of the different storage styles, we also invested our knowledge into how the wood material looked, felt, and smelled. The team chose white ripped oak to match the off-white aesthetic of the outside room and finished it with a wax polish instead of lacquer. While lacquer provides a beautiful smooth finish, it has a more pungent smell than wax. Typically, the use of either lacquer or wax in a wine cellar will depend on the ventilation of the room and your timeframe (since the polish needs time to dry).

This racking is made from ripped white oak. Want to see a wine rack made from sapele mahogany? Click here! — Polishing the wood racking helps prevent splinters. Different polishes have different finishes — some shinier than the other, but all reduce the textured feeling of the wood.

The wax we used here made the wood look amazing and ensured everyone’s safety with its shiny finish!

A Wine Cellar Door that Frames Your Entire Cellar Beautifully

Glass wine cellar doors can either be wood-framed, metal-framed, or frameless. For this wine cellar, the team went with stainless steel to frame the door and glass walls. Having a metal-framed glass enclosure was the perfect choice not just because it emphasized the wooden wine racks but also kept the glass panels visible between the similarly-colored wine room and entertainment room outside (we don’t want people bumping into it!)

These glass panels were custom-made to be highly durable and thick (double-paned and tempered, to be exact) to ensure condensation doesn’t progress inside the cellar no matter how hot it gets outside. With this kind of glass wine cellar door, you’re confident the temperature and humidity levels inside your cellar will be stable all year round.

This corner shelf was purposely made to allow people to see the wines up close through the glass.

Custom Wine Cellar Lights that Adjust to Your Racking Design

There are plenty of wine cellar L.E.D. lights in the market. One of the ways to choose the right one is to consider the placement of your wine collection inside the cellar. This includes looking at your metal or rustic wooden wine racks. When installing a lighting design for your cellar, you’d want to create that aesthetic balance as much as functionality is essential.

Lights allow you to navigate your wine closet safely and conveniently, but you can also arrange them in a way that will make some of your wines stand out. In this cellar, for example, apart from installing the usual ceiling lights, we also ran some ribbon lights along the high-reveal shelves to emphasize the display. High-reveal shelves present the bottles in an inclined, label-forward manner, like how wine sommeliers introduce wines to their customers. The ribbon lights shed more light onto the bottles, allowing people to read the labels quicker.

Go through our gallery and compare how the wine cellar looks with the light on versus the light off. You’ll notice how the lights instantly transform the space into a more stunning sight!

Build the Best Home Wine Cellar with Custom Wine Cellars San Francisco!

If you’ve been dreaming of a traditional or contemporary wine cellar with remarkable wooden wine racking designed just for you, get in touch with Custom Wine Cellars San Francisco!

Custom Wine Cellars San Francisco is a veteran designer and builder of residential and business wine cellars that emphasizes the importance of a long-lasting climate-control system to preserve your wines. Our team is composed of highly dedicated individuals constantly developing their skills and expertise to give you the most up-to-date solutions for your wine cellar. Whether you’re planning on building a wine room in your dining area, basement, under the stairs, or in your hotel’s lobby, Custom Wine Cellars San Francisco has got you covered!