Balboa Wine Room: Before & After
- Oct 19, 2023
- 4 min read
I am excited to take you on a tour, and show you the Before & After, of our wine room.
We bought our new home, our #foreverhomefixer, in the summer of 2020 -- during the most uncertain times of the pandemic.
The home itself is 3160 square feet and built in 1978. It had 3 bedrooms and 3 baths when we purchased it. It is on the golf course in the historic Indian Canyons neighborhood of Palm Springs, which started development in the 1960s and boasts the first 18-hole golf course in Palm Springs.
The house was For Sale by Owner, with a faded hand-written sign and a phone with a San Diego area code. To say that it was a "fixer upper" would be a vast understatement! The owner, who was based in San Diego, had practically abandoned the property. I could tell, from photos he showed me, that he enjoyed good times in the house several years before, but he had not used the property in quite some time.
Above: the entry colonnade as I saw it, when I first saw the property.
I walked in and said, "I'll take it!"
Before: A Laundry Room
We converted the laundry room, which was previously accessible only from the kitchen, into an anteroom or vestibule for the kitchen. The room also features an exterior door to the side walkway of our property, which we use fairly frequently for coming and going, and when we walk Harley.
Above: Literally a photo from when I first saw the house -- yes, this is how the owner was "showing" the property.
The laundry room felt very small, with a swinging door that opened in from the kitchen, L-shaped cabinets, and a large washer and dryer..
In order create the kitchen vestibule, we needed to relocate the laundry room. We moved the laundry room into our primary bathroom, in what was previously the shower. We converted the sunken "Roman tub" into a spacious walk-in open shower.
Pretty quickly after carving out the new space, we started calling it the "wine room" because we realized that it would be a great place for a large wine refrigerator. Since so many parties and events end up in the kitchen, we also wanted to create a small auxiliary zone for food and drinks that was not necessarily in the cooking area itself.
The wine room became our new entry into the kitchen from the public areas of our house. In the photo below, on the right you can see the previous door to the kitchen, which we closed off to add needed usable cabinet space in the kitchen. The cabinetry shown below was the home's original media closet. It featured a historical record of nearly every high-tech media component since the late 1970s! Behind the cabinet is the former laundry room. Where the media closet is became the doorway to the and wine room and kitchen.
The Floor Plan: Before & After
Below is the original house plan. The kitchen is to the left. You can see the original entry to the kitchen, from the dining room. This doorway made the kitchen visible from the living room, which is not our preference. Sealing off this doorway made the dining room feel larger (we use this area as a lounge) and added more usable linear feet in the kitchen.
Below is the plan "after" - showing the laundry converted into the butler's pantry (wine room) and the new powder room.
We decided to use the dining room as a lounge; we incorporated the dining table into the large living area. In the lower right, you can see the washer and dryer placed in the former shower of the primary bathroom.
The Wine Room Plan
Below are our studio's detailed drawings for the wine room. We don't like to leave anything to chance!
I selected Monogram for our appliances. Monogram's 30" wide wine sommelier became the foundation for the wine room. I love that it features two drawers below the wine storage that can be set to either refrigerator or freezer temperatures. On the left side of the wine counter is a Monogram icemaker.
After: Our New Wine Room
Welcome to our new wine room! A new single-light door lets in lots of natural light. The cabinetry is "Desert Oak" by Shinnoki and the faucet is by Brizo.
I selected mirror backsplash tiles to reflect the golf course and really bounce light around.
The Icemaker
Our Monogram icemaker makes sure that we are always ready to entertain guests. I love that it is paneled in the Desert Oak cabinetry and disappears until it is ready to be called into action.
The Wine Refrigerator
The Monogram 30" wine sommelier is truly spectacular. The middle drawer also makes ice -- can you ever have too much ice? -- and the bottom drawer can be set to either freezer or refrigerator temperature. We keep it well-stocked with Prosecco. I mean, can you ever have too much Prosecco on hand? No, I say.
The faucet is the Litze by Brizo and is one of my absolute favorites. The cabinetry is by Emtek and the stone is from Formation in Palm Desert.
I hope you enjoyed this tour of our wine room.
xo
CK
Sources:
Photography: Public 311 Design
Styling: Keith Fortner
Cabinetry: Meza Hill Custom Cabinets
Continue the Tour:
I appreciate the depth of research and clarity in your writing. Your article is incredibly insightful and thought-provoking. merge fellas
The laundry room to wine room conversion is a clever pivot, but I’m curious how you handled the lighting in that windowless space after removing the washer/dryer hookups. We’ve been debating whether to do something similar with a small utility room in our house, so seeing your before and after photos was really helpful — this verified roadmap tracker
That detail about converting the laundry room into a kitchen vestibule while moving the washer and dryer into the primary bathroom shower really stood out to me — we had to do a similar reconfiguration in our own old house and it's amazing how much more functional a space can feel with a simple layout shift. The wine room's transformation from a neglected hallway is a testament to creative thinking about underused square footage. — a simple genre browsing hub
It's surprisingly difficult to think of an original nickname these days. This name generator gave me multiple options that sounded natural.
Your Palm Springs mid-century renovation sounds incredible—transforming a 1978 home into a wine room during the pandemic must have been such a unique challenge. The historic Indian Canyours setting really adds character. I'd love to see what tools or sources you used for that restoration—I've been researching similar projects and would love to lear https://glbviewer.com