When one sets out to build a custom home they should be limited solely to their dreams and budget constraints. If they want a wine cellar so be it, and if the neighbor wants a conference room to host AA meetings that is thier choice. I once did the plumbing in a house that had four bedrooms but 6 full baths and three 1/2 baths and only two people live in the house. Personally i thought it was a bit too much, but far be it from me to tell the next man or woman how to build their dreamhouse. What truely amazes me is the number of people who are designing their dream house, then post on the forum asking the opinions of others as to whether they should have a certain feature or not? The whole idea of a custom home is to create an enviroment that befits your personal lifestyle and interests. In my personal opinion if a guest drops by and don't like your choices they have the option of going back to their little corner of the world where things are done their way. If a wine cellar complete with a tasting bar befits your social habits then by all means that is what you should have, just don't forget an adequate storage facility for the cheese to be served with the wine.

what is the ambient temperature of the surrounding room? The assumption is that since it's in your basement, your floor above will be in a heated room - do you heat your basement too? Is your basement entirely subterranean or do you have 3 ft windows in it like mine? If you are entirely subterranean, and your ground temp is OK. you may not have to insulate the floor. Remember that it can be a heat sink and insulating it can actually raise the temp of the interior space. If your configuration is like I described, you need most insullation on the ceiling. The vibrations from your dishwasher won't be a problem anyhow - the dishwasher is above and it's hard to imagine how it would shake the floor of the wine cellar. I simply have the same concrete floor as the rest of the basement. My cellar is for storage, so I just wanted it to be functional. It's about the same size as you describe. Vapor barriers can be something to think about. If you have a large difference in temp between your cellar and the surrounding space, you can get condensation. in an unheated basement, the problem is more likely against the ceiling than the walls, but each place is different. Generally you put the vapor barrier against the warm side, but that's not a brilliant idea for a ceiling, especially if your joists and flooring is wood, which is probably the case. I don't understand your question about paint. What is your concern? Also, remember that greenboard doesn't really insulate all that well. I was worried about flooding in the basement even though we've never had any, so I used wonderboard, or cement board, like you would use for a bathroom. I also have six inch walls so I could put a lot of insullation in, and I built my own door which is also six inches. If you use extruded polystyrene, you get the maximum insulation per square inch. Thermax, which has foil on one or both sides, is slightly better but deteriorates over time and there is some literature about toxins, so rather than worry about any of that, I just used polystyrene. I also built my own wine racks. If you use individual racking, you lose a lot of space to air, but that is the most convenient for looking at your bottles. If you use some kind of bin, Rhone shaped bottles and anything that's slightly weird can be a real pain to stack. So I made shelves. A Bordeaux bottle is 3" diameter, a Burgundy bottle is about 3 1/4", but some of the Rhones are a little larger and things like Turley, or Champagne, or some Beaujolais, are even larger. So I made shelves spaced at 3 1/2 inches, with a few at the bottom that are 4" and the top which is about 5" for anything weird. That was the compromise that allowed me to get the maximum bottles with the least amount of lost space. Bins are better but as I said, a pain. I did one wall with bins and probably wouldn't do that again. For cooling, you have a lot of options. You can do a split system. You can get a Whisperkool or Breezeaire or something similar. But remember, those coolers are simply air conditioners. AC units don't go down below 65 or so because they'll ice up. So the compressors are sized slightly differently and the evaporation coils are sized slightly differently than the wine chiller units. If you got your AC to go to 60 or below, you wouldn't have adequate evaporation. So what to do? Get a larger unit. The smallest room AC is about 3000 BTU, or 5000 BTU, which is far more than you need to get that small room cool. If you trick it, you can get it to cool to the 50s or so and you're in good shape. I just bought a $99 Samsung and the temp is around 59 - 62 degrees F. You can pull the thermostat wire thru the grill, which gets you about 5 degrees right there, and you can tape a small resistor to it that gets you another few degrees, and you spent $99 for a cooling system that works fine. I'm not going to get into an engineering description of cooling systems, but people modify big ACs for meat lockers if they're hunters, and it actually works pretty good for a wine cellar. But a spare in case you burn it out and use the savings for more wine.

My upcoming build will have a few "secret" things. One will be into a safe room in the basement(really a tornado shelter but people think safe room sounds cooler LOL). I will also have a hidden door to slide groceries into pantry from the foyer. I may make that a full sized door disguised as a bookshelf, not decided yet. We will also put a gun safe somewhere in a false walled room. (as well as store paperwork important documents there). The builder that is doing our house has also put lofts in kids bedrooms, not exactly secret but a cool spot for kids to have a little fort area. If I had a layout where this would work, I'd love a secret door into a powder room. Or a wet bar like in a James Bond type movie.

I saw this on a friends FB page. I love the idea of the trap door in the floor for a wine cellar or pantry. This one eliminates all the cabinets/appliances you can put in the island though! Here I am making my island bigger and bigger to get more into it!