We love kitchens, they make us happy and are the main focus of our day, so when we get asked to design and make something a little bit different we get all silly with excitement. A bar with wine storage in a beautiful home near Regent’s Park, we liked the sound of that.

As you walked through the house and down into the basement, there was a warren of rooms all centred around a wonderful sunken walled garden hanging with greenery and ferns. There were lots of delightful places to sit, lie, lounge or eat, all in total privacy and peace, so to be able to wander inside and grab a cold beer or mix up a Negroni is, well, sheer luxury.

We redesigned a big Curiosity Cupboard to hold up to 180 bottles of wine, separate spaces for magnums and then shelves for liqueurs and spirits. The new look cupboards worked so well and painted in deVOL’s Printer's Black with Trinity Blue interiors, they really did transform into very good wine storage.

A glazed wall cupboard for glassware, a freezer and wine fridge and a Carrara marble worktop finished off this little area. The customer had managed to find a vintage Tabac sign on eBay, it came over from France and they got it renovated and attached to a painted brick wall to finish off the whole bar look. It worked perfectly, giving soft light, authentic charm and an acknowledgement that this was a bar!!

I think we would all love to have a room like this in our home but it was the location that really made it work, it was an area rather than a room and it had access into the garden so it just seemed like the real thing. A local Tabac in the South of France, locals hanging out in the sunshine drinking Ricard or strong coffee and chatting, to be able to recreate that vibe in your home is pretty much what dreams are made of.