Commercial Glass Display Runs for Wine and Spirits
Five commercial glass display runs for wine and spirits, one construction behind them all and five different interiors in the same continuous door line. A run is a rhythm before it is a cupboard, which is why it is easy to specify and hard to get right.
What the photographs show
Five full height runs, each set into a prepared opening with a continuous plinth and a black, bronze or champagne frame. One has six bays and a different interior in every bay. One is black outside and gold inside. One carries stemware in its two left hand bays and bottles in the other five. One is so long it follows the room to the far wall. One holds gift cartons beside the bottles, with a mirror niche and a bank of bottle drawers.
What the build had to solve
A run lives or dies on the repeat. Every door is cut to the same 18 mm frame and the same 3 mm reveal, so the eye counts bays instead of noticing joints. The interiors cannot all be the same depth, though: a bay taking bottles on cradles is punched deeper than a bay taking stemware, and a run that mixes the two is built to the deepest carcass with the shallow bays packed out behind. Stepping the front instead is the one thing to avoid, because then the door line stops being a line.
What to copy, and what to avoid
What is worth copying is the plinth: one continuous shadow gap along the floor makes a nine door run read as a single object. What is worth refusing is a change of frame colour halfway along a run, used to separate zones. It reads as a repair, and no client has ever un-seen it afterwards.
- Door line
- Uniform 18 mm frame, 3 mm reveal
- Carcass depth
- Set by the deepest bay in the run
- Interiors
- Cradles, shelves, stemware racks, mirror grids
- Back panels
- Mirror, textured bronze, or matte painted
- Plinth
- Continuous, set back from the door line
- Production
- 30 to 40 days, quoted per project
Frame 18 mm · glass panes up to 2,400 mm · scribe 40 mm · door reveal 3 mm · lead time 30 to 40 days, quoted per project · crated to a numbered setting-out drawing
The same scene, frame by frame
Photographs from our project archive, grouped by room type rather than by client. No client and no address is named on these pages.
What clients ask about a room like this one
How wide can one glass door be?
A single leaf is comfortable to about 700 mm; past that it starts to twist as it opens, so the run needs a wider stile or a double leaf. No pane is taken beyond 2,400 mm in either direction, which is also the reason a tall run is split into two rows of doors rather than one.
Do the bays have to match inside?
No, and they usually should not. Stemware, upright bottles, bottles on cradles and gift cartons want different depths and different shelf pitches. What has to match is the door line in front of them.
A room like this one, to your dimensions
Send three photographs of the wall and the bottle count. What comes back is a scheme, a drawing and a fixed price.