5 Tips to Elevate Restaurant Wine Racks To Jaw-Dropping Design Elements
Restaurants that boast great wine lists deserve great wine displays. A restaurant wine rack featured prominently in your space enhances the atmosphere and brings your wine list to life. There’s nothing like an eye-catching wine display to entice guests to order a bottle - or three.
Just as good wine goes hand-in-hand with good food, a striking wine rack pairs perfectly with a lively restaurant, each bringing out the characteristics of the other and creating a richer experience for your guests.
1. Make your restaurant wine rack the visual center of your space
With professional grade cooling technology to protect it, you can bring your wine out of the cellar and into the spotlight. As a central design element, your boast-worthy wine menu becomes tangible and accessible, tempting your guests in a way that a paper list could never pull off.
2. Employ artful bottle display
Just as careful design is required to create a stunning wine rack, it’s also needed when stocking it. Think about lining up labels, or arranging bottles in a sculptural grouping - don’t fill every inch, make it feel curated and cared for. Use your bottle display to highlight wines that pair perfectly with featured menu dishes. Be sure to keep popular bottles easy to access.
Instead of jamming as many bottles in as possible, nearly as much space is left empty in the top two shelves of this wine rack at Five Spice restaurant. Your eye is drawn to the small groupings of bottles, sparking your curiosity about why each wine was selected for this special place.
3. Lighting is everything
Custom restaurant wine racks allow you to create ambiance with lighting effects. From a subtle warm glow for daytime dining to color effects for nighttime drama, lighting amplifies the visual impact of your wine rack.
The soft backlighting of Five Spice restaurant’s wine rack adds to the warmth of the room and draws your eye to the bottles held within.
4. Use materials that speak to your location
If your menu and wine list are strongly rooted in your locale, you can aim to do the same with your wine rack. Just as you source local ingredients to inspire your menu, carefully consider what materials to use - are there local woods or craftspeople that could add to the character and authenticity of your wine rack? Like farm-to-table dining, a wine rack crafted with local materials can be a celebration of place and a demonstration of your restaurant’s ethos.
If local materials aren’t available, are there specific design elements from your existing space to play upon? Five Spice restaurant in Lake Oswego used Mahogany Sapele for its built-in, floor-to-ceiling display and racking system. Although the wood isn’t sourced locally, it echoes the curves of the restaurant walls and matches the rich, warm tones of the space. A custom library ladder and custom steel hardware lend an easy, timeless elegance to the contemporary design.
5. Create a view from every angle
Use your whole vertical space. Instead of closing in the sides of a display, take advantage of them so that every table feels like the best seat in the house. A dynamic, engaging wine rack can be the perfect conversation starter and can tempt guests into pairing a bottle with their meal. Watching a bottle be fetched from the wine rack for another table can be all it takes to motivate guests to choose a bottle for their own table.
Interested in a custom wine rack for your restaurant?
With offices in Portland and San Diego, we work with clients up and down the West Coast to design and build built-in wine storage for commercial and residential customers. Check out our custom wine cellar projects to see more of our work, or contact us to schedule a quick call to chat about your project.