“The less you see, the better; the less you hear, the better,” says Bill Calyanis, president and owner of Controlled Temperatures Inc., of Stamford, Connecticut. Rather than using cookie-cutter elements, he selects components from various manufacturers for each cellar and designs a fully ducted system that aims to work silently and invisibly.  “All you should know is that it’s cool and damp in the wine cellar,” he says, “just the way you want it.” And, he adds, even a complex system should be easy to operate.

Rule No. 4: Go for the beautiful

It’s an agreeable job, choosing the wood, the stone, the lighting, and the music that will combine to create the mood you want to establish.

One of Bogue’s favorite cellars was carved out of the rock beneath a house in Marblehead, Massachusetts. “It was a real cave,” he says, with a feel like that of a cellar dug out of French limestone. Very few homeowners can hope for this sort of raw material; still, introducing natural stone—limestone, granite, and fieldstone—as well as polished wood will lend an Old World sensibility to a cellar, making it seem like a centuries-old cavern instead of something you just built.

“The old-fashioned Tuscany look is big,” says Rose. “People want that old-fashioned wine grotto from the seventeenth century with cobblestone floors and the fieldstone background.”

Neil Hauck, an architect in Darien, Connecticut, looks for ways to enliven the décor of the cellar with something reminiscent of wine country—a map or object that evokes the heritage and beauty of the countryside that produces the wine. “If I have an opportunity,” he says, “I like to bring a little bit of the wine lore in somewhere, so it’s not all just bottles of wine.”

Storage racks and cabinets—for single bottles or whole cases—are a dominant visual feature. You can choose anything from oak to redwood to cherry, but Hauck believes that tropical hardwoods rack up best.