A recent project we completed on Anarchist Mountain just East of Osoyoos, involved the demolition, redesign, and rebuild of a homeowner-built wine cellar in a high-end home. The existing wood-built wine cellar didn’t provide enough headroom to walk around the room and looked cluttered. The first few days were spent removing all of the wood structure throughout the room to assess what we were up against.,
The design phase started after we had removed the wood and had a clean look at the existing rock outcropping in the room. The obvious goals were to make the room functional for walking around and for wine storage. The elevation of the rock outcropping was the ultimate driver for design, I wanted a path around the room while maintaining headroom and unique spaces for wine storage that made sense. The clients were presented with a sketchup drawing of my proposal.
We supplied and installed natural K2 Arbutus fieldstone on all existing concrete foundation walls and newly built masonry wine storage units. The stone was installed with an overgrout joint to provide a rustic cave-like look that compliments the natural rock outcrop in the room.
We supplied and installed two masonry wine storage units (roughly 200 units) out of Terra Cotta clay hexagonal units from Superior clay: https://www.superiorclay.com/other-clay-products/wine-storage-tiles/
The benefits of this product is they provide thermal mass to reduce temperature fluctuations, they never rot in a cool and damp environment, and have been used in wine storage for hundreds of years.
The wine storage units were built with architectural details; a natural stone arch over one unit and a veneer one-piece stone header look over the other unit. We also installed a 2″ thick stone sill on the bottom transition between the clay units and stone. All foundation walls were capped with a 2″ thick and 6″ deep natural stone sill. All walkways and landings were built of 1″ thick cut and flamed K2 flagstone. Extra time and effort was spent to cut the flagstone for a tight fit around the rock outcrop, and the flagstone was hand-cut and milled with a radius and bullnose on the stone steps.
