Wine Cellar Innovations: Turning Wine Cellars Into Living Spaces

Wine cellars don't have to be dark catacombs in the basement. With some stylish designer touches, you can make the place your store your wine a welcoming additional living space in your home. You can add art, custom design, and personal touches to your wine cellar. They can become tasting rooms that are also temperature and humidity controlled environments to store and age your wine.

One of the first companies to offer artistic wine cellar design is Wine Cellar Innovations in Cincinnati, Ohio.  Starting as a wine rack company in 1985, Jim Deckebach, a former a home builder, speculated that there might be a growing need for wine storage in the US. Since then, Wine Cellar Innovations has evolved from just making racks into complete design. “That's where designers such as myself enter in on,” says Bob Guillen,designer and outside representative for Wine Cellar Innovations. “It's not just selling a wine rack. It's designing something that's really going to be an aesthetic for people.”

According to Guillen, some hot tub manufactures used scrap redwood to make wine racks and launched wine storage companies. “Most of the companies are mirrored after us,” he says. “We are the foremost company in the United States today.”

Wine Cellar Innovations is able to not only design a wine cellar that will house all of your wine and protect it from disturbances and fluctuations in temperature, humidity, and light, but the company can help you create a beautiful, romantic room that you can bring guests to for wine tastings. They can add stunning touches such as decorative murals or wall art, mosaic tiles, stained glass, tumbled stone flooring, hand-painted tiles, special lighting, and intricately carved moldings. They have artists on call who handle custom designs for wall art, murals, painted tiles, and glass etching. In fact, the muralist has been flown all over the world to paint on-site at a cellar installation.

The company employs nearly 300 creative people at its 350,000 square foot manufacturing plant and corporate office. “That's our design center,” says Guillen. “But we're capable of going everywhere. We've done wine cellars in Australia and Bermuda and everywhere around the world. We're expanding as we're speaking. We are probably the largest company now, and we're American made....Quite a lot of our competition manufactures in Mexico or Canada. We pride ourselves to make everything in the United States, in Cincinnati, and ship it from there.”