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Wine By Design
Signature Wine Wall
In yesteryears wine cellars were relegated to – as a cellar would imply – underground areas. Historically, cellars were dark and quiet respites for the storage and unabated maturation of wine. More recently, with the increase in the popularity of wine and its storage, wine cellars have moved out of the basement and become focal points in homes and restaurants, often ensconced behind glass walls to maintain the temperature and humidity requirement for aging wine. Rob Hussey (Hussey Real Estate Group) has taken the evolution to the next step. Set in a contemporary home in Brentwood (West Los Angeles) that Hussey designed and built with partner Mark Keckeisen (Woods Design Group) is an entire wall of concrete dedicated to the storage of wine. “The idea originated from a wall of terra cotta pipes that I saw in a Spanish house.” Hussey commented when asked the genesis of his design.
”I had the idea – for a contemporary house – to construct a wine cellar using cinderblock turned on its side and placing the bottles in the openings of the block, but that was very inefficiency. Cinderblock only comes in rectangular shapes and that left a lot of wasted space for a symmetrically-shaped wine bottle. The idea then evolved into a poured-in-place wall with open cylinders for the wine storage. The Brentwood design had a number of poured-in-place concrete elements; so it was a natural fit to make the wine wall out of concrete.”
A two-foot thick wall was poured between the screening room and the wine lounge. The wall is backed on the screening room side and open to the wine lounge. The wall is trimmed in Douglas Fir, has a cantilevered Glulam bar in a center niche with wine glass storage, an built-in wine bottle opener, and overhead light, and a rolling library ladder for access to the upper bottles. Each cylinder holds two bottles of wine in tandem. The entire wall can store up to 510 bottles. There’s a section with larger cylinders for the storage of magnum bottles. The wall is chilled in a fashion similar to that of radiant heat with cold water circulated through plastic tubes that run through the wall. The wall has three zones; each can be set to a different temperature (as white wines typically are stored at a lower temperature than reds). Because of the row and column layout of the columns a collector can address the various cylinders using spreadsheet convention with numbered rows and lettered columns to find the perfect bottle of Château Mouton Rothschild in cylinder E12 and record the storage addresses in a wine storing software program.
This design looks to be a signature piece in the future Hussey/Woods projects. We look forward to seeing its evolution.
To experience this room in person please visit 171 3rd Anita in Brentwood by calling Randy Forbes at: 310-345-7082 
May 2009
This is beautiful! We’re planning a custom wine cellar design with Vintage Cellars, and I am definitely into the idea of a wine wall now… it seems to save so much space and utilize your room in a useful manner.
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