Nothing speaks of extravagance and luxury of a home more than its wine cellar. Reasons behind this are numerous and they are all equally persuading. First and foremost, you get your own supply of wine composed of your own handpicked vintages. Second, you get something to boast about to your household visitors and last, but not the least important, it significantly boosts your home’s property value. Even though having a wine cellar seems so alluring, making this dream come to life is far from easy and most people wouldn’t even know where to start. For this reason alone, here are some tips and tricks.

Room Selection

There is no law against putting your wine cellar anywhere in the house, but it is most practical if you find the coolest and most humid place in your home to fit this purpose.

As you can see, you will first have to learn how to store wine, since knowing how to enjoy it is obviously not enough on its own. On the contrary, maintenance alone in terms of cooling units and adequate insulation will on their own cost an arm and a leg. This is why most people go with the basement in the first place.

Additional Construction

Regardless of how adequate your room may seem; you will have to put in some additional effort to transform it into a genuine wine cellar. First you will have to install studs, soffits and add some rough in refrigeration to the room. Now, this can be quite expensive as a construction, but if you have a contractor friend and you help out when it comes to rough works, all of this can cost next to nothing. After all, the materials alone are quite cheap, so your only major expense will be in case of adding refrigeration. When you finish with these initial layers, you can do the insulation and cover the walls up.

Furnishing Your Cellar

Here, you will have the chance to express your inner designer since furnishing your room the proper way requires a lot of finesse. You will first have to choose suitable wine cupboards and here you can go for anything from vintage (pun intended) to contemporary.

After this, you can dedicate yourself to details such as cellar doors, flooring and ceiling. Just remember that you will bring people in for your wine exhibits, so you cannot afford to be reckless with its design. Finally, you can dedicate some time to choosing the perfect lighting system, but for the sake of your wine make sure to turn it off as soon as you leave the room. In fact, it might even be a good long term investment to get a motion sensor controlled system.

Supplying the Cellar

Finally, we come to the fun part. After all of the hard work is done, all you need to do is properly stock your newly built cellar. Some may believe that when you come to this point, everything works out on its own, but it is quite far from truth. The entire success of your cellar depends on how much are you willing to spend on wine, and by the time you get here your budget will probably already be stretched thin.

However, in a recent conversation with people behind successful bottle shops from Sydney it came to our attention that you don’t have to stock your cellar at once. This can be a gradual process (ever spanning over the course of several years) which can be quite light on your wallet.

As you can see, there are countless reasons why your home desperately needs a wine cellar and not a single reason against it. Sure, designing a wine cellar may be a bit more difficult that simply redecorating your living room, but it is also more rewarding. Although some believe that this luxury must cost an arm and a leg, it all depends on three things. How much are you willing to do on your own. How much are you willing to invest in the decoration itself and of course, how significant parts of your budget are you going to allocate to stocking it with wine.

Guest Post By:

Chloe is an art historian, recreational ballet dancer and a contributor at smoothdecorator.com. She is passionate about photography, dance and music. Her biggest dream is to travel the whole world with her husband and take stunning photographs of beautiful places. She also enjoys learning and writing about home design, since she is crazy about aesthetics. You can find Chloe on FB, Twitter, and G+.