The drinks cabinet we never got to build

Not every design makes it off the drawing board. Projects pause, plans change, and sometimes a scheme we loved stays as a set of drawings. This is one of those. It’s a drinks cabinet we designed for a lounge in a house in Hertfordshire, and the project didn’t go ahead. But it went through three versions, and each one solved a problem worth sharing. If you’re thinking about a drinks cabinet in your own home, most of what we learned applies.

Put the drinks cabinet in the awkward corner

Lounges often have one corner that doesn’t do much. Too tight for a chair, too visible to ignore. That’s where we put this cabinet.

A corner unit uses space that would otherwise go to waste. The real reason we angled it, though, was the doors. A drinks cabinet you have to open fully to use will either stay shut or block the room when it’s open. Set on an angle, the doors swing open without getting in the way of anyone walking through. It sounds like a small thing. It’s the difference between a cabinet you use every weekend and one that just holds bottles.

We also built it into the room’s panelling and wallpaper, so it reads as part of the wall rather than a piece of furniture pushed into a corner.

Make it belong to the rest of the house

The door fronts carry a curved, interlocking pattern that we’d already used on the entrance and dining room doors. You’d never point it out to a guest. But walk from the hall through to the lounge and the house feels like it was designed as one, rather than room by room.

This is one of the easiest ways to make joinery look expensive: borrow a detail from somewhere else in the home and repeat it quietly.

Version one: dark and moody

The first scheme was rich and low-lit:

• Dark oak veneer on the cabinet
• A deep teal-blue worktop (Versital, in a colour called Kingfisher) for the serving shelf
• Antique mirror lining the middle section, so the bottles and glasses glow when the doors open
• A brushed brass plinth, so the whole thing looks like it’s sitting on a slim gold base
• LED strips along the shelves for evening light

Inside, we planned for how drinks actually get used: glass storage at the top, a rack for wine bottles laid flat, space for standing bottles, a shallow drawer for bits like bottle openers, stirrers and coasters, and an insert that holds a removable ice bucket. That last one is the detail people always remember.

Version two: soft pink and mirror

After talking it through with the clients, we went in a completely different direction. Same shape, same corner, new mood.

The cabinet was spray-painted in two soft, chalky pinks from COAT Paint, with the curved door pattern picked out against a pink patterned wallpaper set into the door panels. The antique mirror stayed inside. It’s a good example of how much finishes alone can change a piece. The structure didn’t move, but it went from a gentleman’s club to something much lighter and more playful.

The lower half became closed cupboards, which brings us to the fridge.

The drinks cabinet fridge problem

The brief was a fridge mainly for soft drinks and cans. Simple, you’d think. It isn’t.

Fridges designed purely for cans are commercial units, like the ones you see in a café. They’re built to be seen, with glass fronts and no way of fitting a cabinet door over them. If you want the fridge hidden behind joinery, you need an integrated model, and integrated fridges are designed around food, not cans.

So we looked for integrated under-counter fridges with the most room for cans and bottles that would still fit the space. We shortlisted three:

• Beko BLS4682, a straightforward under-counter option
• Smeg UKU8C082DE, another integrated under-counter model
• Liebherr Premium UIKO1560, which uses pull-out drawers instead of shelves, so you can see everything from above

One knock-on effect: fitting a proper integrated fridge meant making the cabinet deeper, from 500mm to 600mm. That’s the kind of thing worth knowing early. Pick the appliance first, then design the joinery around it. Not the other way round.

Version three: the practical tweaks

The final round brought in the everyday stuff:

• The coffee machine moved in. If the cabinet already has power and a worktop, it may as well be your coffee station in the morning and your bar in the evening.
• A double socket, with built-in USB chargers, so nothing needs a trailing lead.
• Mirror on the doors instead of wallpaper, which bounces light around the room and makes the corner feel bigger.

Drinks cabinet ideas we would still use

If you’re planning a drinks cabinet, here’s the short version:

1. Use a corner, and angle the doors so it can stay open without blocking the room.
2. Choose the fridge before the cabinet is drawn. It affects the depth, the doors and the budget.
3. Know that a “can fridge” and a hidden fridge are two different things. You’ll usually have to pick one.
4. Plan the inside for real use: glasses, bottles lying down and standing up, a drawer for small bits, somewhere for ice.
5. Put power in. A socket turns it into a coffee station too.
6. Repeat a detail from elsewhere in the house so it looks like it was always meant to be there.
7. Mirror and lighting inside do more for the “wow” when the doors open than anything else.

We never got to see this one built. We still think about that ice bucket insert.