Statistics Professor Phil Spector didn't have to crunch the numbers
to understand that he was about to embark on a home improvement that experts
would view as over-improvement, others as just plain eccentricity.
One of the so-called bedrooms in his tiny, 1920s bungalow, just a few
blocks from his office at UC Berkeley, doesn't even have a closet. There's
just one bathroom, and 1,100 square feet of living space.
Yet, after four months, 20 truckloads of dirt and "a couple of hundred
thousand dollars" flew out the window, Spector holds the key to a secret door
embedded in his redwood deck that leads down to what he and contractor Miki
Erez say is the only fully excavated wine cellar in Contra Costa and Alameda
counties. "I can certainly imagine someone looking at this and going, 'Well,
there's a big worthless mess; maybe we can just cover it up,' " Spector says.
But the man's wearing a big smile. Home improvement, over-improvement,
eccentricity? Nah, he's talking pure fantasy. Ten flagstone-gold steps down
and a push of a dark, heavy, arched door that looks as if it could have come
from Dom Perignon's chateau, and Spector finds himself in the Rhone Valley,
Bordeaux or his beloved Medoc, hundreds of years ago.
Everything in the 10-by-10 room is new, with the exception of some sort
of farm implement that hangs on one wall. (What exactly it was used for
depends on a viewer's creativity and wine consumption.) But the wood beams in
the 8-foot-high ceiling look ancient. The floors were intentionally laid out
to be uneven, then stained with splotches of oil. Straw was incorporated into
the textured walls, and the wine racks were even burned for an aged look. "I
personally feel that wine's a lot happier kept in the ground and given a
natural reflection of what the climate is, than it is to stay in a
refrigerator or an ordinary cabinet," says Spector, who has been collecting
wines for 30 years. "So the big advantage of having a cellar like this is you
just feel that tradition of the way the wine's been aged that has been going
on for hundreds and hundreds of years.
"The only thing I can think of as a disadvantage is your backyard is in
disarray for a really long time."
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Stellar Cellar
Berkeley homeowner builds beautiful cave-like dwelling in back yard
By Candace Murphy,
InsideBayArea Staff Writer
THE WINE CELLAR
was not going to work.
It wasn't even a cellar, anyway. It was a 2-foot by 2-foot hole in the
wall just off the kitchen with room for maybe eight bottles.
Even when Berkeley homeowner Phil Spector carved out the floor of
the space and replaced the linoleum with a screen so that cool air from below
could help his wine age properly, there was just no denying that his wine
storage system, well, stank.
"Every house I've been in, I've been able to find someplace to put
wine. Usually in a crawl space," says Spector, who admits that whatever could
crawl in the 2-foot by 2-foot space would more likely be some critter, rather
than a sommelier. "It got to the point where I thought it was normal. But
this? This wasn't going to work."
Spector, with the help of Miki Erez of Perfect Service Industries,
Inc., in Orinda, built his own cellar. A beautiful cave-like cellar underneath
his back deck with a capacity, right now, for 700 bottles. It's the only
one of its kind in both Alameda and Contra Costa counties, but more on that
later.
Spector's situation isn't unique for Bay Area oenophiles whose homes'
pricey square footage often doesn't yield closet
space, let alone cozy encampments for Syrahs and Pinot Noirs to keep their
cool. Some make do with the cave-like areas under their homes, a head-banging
proposition that involves no rock music. Others buy modern cooling units
or build customized "cellars," which are really just temperature-controlled
rooms with etched glass in the door that look uncannily like a United Airlines
Red Carpet Club.
But modernity, a la the Red-Carpet-Club-type cellar, wasn't Spector's
style. And as a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley,
he also didn't like the odds of his house collapsing if he somehow made room
for storage under his home.
That's when Erez and Spector started thinking outside the box. In fact, outside the home, altogether.
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