Under Stairs Wine Storage: Working With a Triangle

Draw the line before you draw the racking

Headroom under a stair falls from the tall end to the low end. At one end there is a doorway worth of height; at the other there is not enough to kneel in.

So mark the line where you can still reach in with one arm and see what you are touching. Everything beyond that line is storage you cannot serve, and no amount of racking changes it.

That line, not the floor area, is the number the whole design comes from.

Three zones, three different jobs

A stair void divides into three bands, and treating them as one space is why so many of these end up as a cupboard with bottles in it.

• Tall end: the door, and the only part where a person can stand. This is where the bottles you drink most belong.
• Middle: reachable on one knee, with a light. Good for rows you rotate seasonally.
• Low end: reachable only lying down, if at all. Long-term storage, or not wine.

Turning the bottles is usually the answer

Bottles stored horizontally need depth, and the wedge has depth everywhere but height nowhere at the low end. Turned so the necks face the door, at an angle that follows the rake, the low end becomes usable.

What that costs is the label. You cannot read a label on a bottle stored neck-out without pulling it, so neck-out storage is for bottles you already know.

On a storage void that is a fair trade. On a display void it is not, and that is the decision to make before anything is made.

The stair is a structure, not a ceiling

The underside of a stair carries the stair. Nothing should be fixed to it without knowing what it is: a timber string with plaster behind it, a steel spine, and a concrete soffit are three different fixing problems.

It is often also a fire-resisting element, which is why a sealed, cooled room under a stair is a different proposition from open racking under one. The racking is furniture. The room is a building alteration.

If the void is going to be cooled

An under-stair void is one of the leakiest spaces in a house, because it was built as a cupboard and never had to be anything else.

Cooling it means treating it as a room: a continuous sealed envelope, a vapour barrier, an insulated door and a vent path. That work happens before any racking, and it is the part that decides whether the space is a cellar or a cupboard with bottles in it.

It also means the stair above becomes the ceiling, so the insulation and the fire line are the same assembly and have to be designed together.

What belongs at the low end

Not wine you intend to drink. Cases still in their cardboard, magnums laid flat, spirits in boxes, files, the vacuum cleaner.

The low end is where things go that come out once a year. Deciding that at the drawing stage is better than discovering it after the racking is full and the bottom two rows have been filled with the wrong things.