Wine Cellar Mural

Well, it’s not really a cellar, but wine ‘closet’ just didn’t sound as appealing.

First, let me just say how much I love these clients. I met them years ago when I was a floral designer in a craft store and she was planning her daughter’s wedding. I wound up doing all the flowers for the wedding, and from there we became great friends.

When they had the floorplans for their dream home, she called me. She knew she wanted a mural in the dining room and guest bath. The funny thing is those were the last 2 spaces I painted!

Today I’ll show you their wine room. They grow their own grapes – shoot, I wish I had a picture of the vineyard. It’s beautiful.

This is how it looked ‘before’. (Disregard the date on my camera. I always forget to change that dang thing.) It’s about 11’ long by 6’ wide. They just had boxes and boxes of wine.

So I always start with renderings so the clients have something to visualize. I thought the base color was fine so I showed them a couple different simple color washes.

Burnt umber washed over their base coat.

This looks similar, but actually there’s a little red in the glaze. Since they were adding wood wine racks, I thought we could pick up some of the tones.

This last one I had from one of my classes, but I thought I’d let them choose from a stone block option, as well.

Then I gave them some ideas for artwork.

Simple arch with grape ivy & a couple clusters of grapes. I liked the idea of letting the sky in. (I didn’t know about wine rooms at the time, obviously. You don’t let light in!)

An option for the ceiling. Like an observatory, kind of. I still was on the ‘letting the sky in’ vibe with this. Can I tell you how glad I was they didn’t opt for ceiling art? Pretty hard on the ol’ neck!

Here’s another option that she loved, but he didn’t want to pay for That happens quite often in my biz.

It’s really pretty simple, just a little time consuming. You embed grapes into the texture of the wall and then put your glaze over it. She liked this sample so much, I let her keep it.

Last option was simply an exposed brick, which they liked.

So it went from the above sample board to this –

This is the view over the door. But it’s a good picture of the burnt umber wash that, yes, once again Hubster did.

This is the door looking into the wine room, before the wine racks were installed.

Here’s a pic after the wine racks were installed. They weren’t as red as we thought, so I’m glad we just stayed with the burnt umber finish on the walls.

The faux niche. If you look on the urn it says “Brunello”. This was one of their favorite wineries when they vacationed in Italy. That’s the fun stuff about custom painting – you get to make it your own!