Looks like this is a week for alternatives, but this one is a little less… contentious, shall we say, than the one from yesterday.
While looking at this article about Harry Redknapp’s little beach cottage, one of the pics got me thinking. While I think the house in general is awful (like Alyssa Milano: quite lovely from the outside; inside, not so much), this room is excellent:
Now I have little use for a wine cellar, being that I don’t drink a lot of wine and have no interest in collecting it either. But a temperature/humidity-controlled room, with very limited access… can we all say “Gun Room“, children?
If I ever same into something like this (assuming it was in the Land Of The Free and not Hoplophobic Britannia), I know that one of the first things I’d do is turn to the interior designer and say, “Lose all those faggy shelves and stuff, and put in some glassed gun display cases, with room for a couple-three safes on the side.” All that’s left is to have a decent, robust table somewhere with several clamps for gun cleaning and -smithing, and there ya go.
The same is true of houses that have projection rooms — in-home cinemas, as it were — which I think are a total waste of space. Here’s one, from some mega-mansion on the market here in Plano:
Once again, a room with no windows, a single door access… who the hell needs stupid Disney movies that much. when you could have a primo gun room?
I know, I’m so hopelessly out of touch.
Here is the site to go to for your new room. https://www.julianandsons.com/gun-rooms
You may want to check your lottery tickets first.
Yeah. That’s what it would take for any of us mere mortals to afford something like that. (Kind of like Kim’s favorite cars come to think of it. 😉
The obvious general corollary for the landscaping is noting that this golf course is a waste of a good rifle range. This has been solved by the Silver Dollar Golf & Trap Club in FL, who has golf on one side of the road, and shotgun ranges on the other.
I dream of having a gun room some day, and when I can finally get the hell out of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Massachusetts I intend to. I don’t believe it’ll be as plush as your examples, but it’s the function that really matters.
I’m going to have to check out Silver Dollar. I’ve been driving down to Sarasota when I want to shoot clays. Odessa is much closer.
Well my detached home office is my gun room. And my guitar room. Me and my mutt live here most of the time, only going to the house to eat, clean up, and sleep. I also do a little work here if I have to. As soon as you walk in the door it is clear what goes on in here all the time. Guns laying all over the place, amps sitting around, a line of guitars and long guns against every wall, 2 tables in the middle slammed with guns, gun parts, picks, etc. Gun safes? My whole office is a gun safe! Oh yeah, a huge bank of 70’s era Pioneer stereo equipment (yes, including a 10 RTR recorder) and giant HPM100 speakers in all 4 corners. I drank some wine once, a long time ago. Put some in a waterpipe too, a long time ago.
That wine room is way too fancy for me. I drink a lot of wine and keep a lot around but wonky IKEA shelving in a dark dank corner of the basement works well enough. If my wines were more conveniently located I’d be a total alcoholic.
Plus, look at all the identical bottles. The only place I value “Diversity” is in a wine collection.
Speaking of which, can anyone recommend a truly dry American red wine? I have had a few recommended me by various folk on the internet and they’ve all been too sweet. California wines have all been intolerable and the best so far were from Washington, and I’ll keep trying but it’s hard in the face of Costco selling me a litre of Argentinian “Iris” for $8.
My go to plonk is the Kirkland Cabernet…Not great, but adequate.
I’ve tried the Kirkland California Cabernet and I agree with you. My reason for calling an otherwise very good wine merely adequate is the sweetness.
A few days ago I tried a bottle of the Kirkland Alexander Valley cabernet. It was a great wine, full bodied, spicy, fruity but too sweet.
Right now, up here in Canada, Kirkland has the best price to value ratio for European and South American reds.
You might want to browse the selection here…..
https://www.drytowncellars.com/
They will be happy to answer any question that you might have.
If you have a Trader Joe’s in your neighborhood, go get some of their Griffone. The Primativo, chianti and 17-something-or-other are all pretty dry. Their Sangiovese is semi-sweet, but not in a bad way.
Why not both a gun room, and a wine room, and a home theater (I’m sure as hell not going to go to one ever again)?
My current house came with a home theater and a wine cellar. I do drink wine, but not a lot of it. There is lots of room for storage of LTS food items.
For a gun room, I re-purposed the ‘fitness’ room, which was in the basement and lacked windows. I created a fitness room with a window.
Although those gun cabinets in the office at the link given above look pretty good…but I’m not into showpiece guns, mine are butt-ugly and mostly tactical so they wouldn’t look as good.
Guns to the right, wine to the left, into the room of death strode Q. 🙂
Wine Cellars make good gun rooms because they are usually located in corner of the basement in a cool spot surrounded on 2 or 3 sides with cinderblock walls below grade. Easy to make the one wall secure and add a “Vault” type Doorway turning the enitre room into your Gun safe. Also easy to add an “inner sanctum” behind a hidden entry to really get your “James Bond’s Q” fantasies satisfied.
The “Home theater” shown in the photo is an object lesson in why you never let your wife’s interior decorator anywhere near the Home Theater. I have a larger screen in the bedroom. That whole far wall should be where the roll down acoustically transparent Screen lives. ….. and don’t get me started on the sound quality destroyed by those walnut paneled walls.
As a 20+ year career projectionist and sound technician, I couldn’t agree more on the paneling. Far too live. I’m not a fan of roll-up screens personally, but they *must* be acoustically transparent…and therein lies the problem in a home environment or even a shoebox cinema complex. The closer you are to the screen (as in under about 20-30 feet) the bigger the holes in the screen get. So if you’re a cinephile/videophile they absolutely become noticeable. The alternative is to position your L-C-R channels below the screen, but you lose good soundstage positioning that way.
I also have a problem with the fact it only has two surround speakers (one on the left, one on the right). Ls/Rs should be distributed along the entire side of the seating area, along with Lb/Rb behind the seating, at *at minimum* four height channels in the ceiling. If’n you’re forking over six figures for a home theater at least equip the damned thing with a proper Dolby Atmos setup, bass shakers in the seats, multiple subs and professionally-calibrated acoustics with properly matched components.
Likewise make sure that projector is top-end 4k and can reproduce all four HDR formats. I’d rather sit on a 30 year old $50 Goodwill sofa in a decently set up room with perfect sound than in that Yuppie Horror Room shown above. Now if *I* had the money for a real home theater there would be a pair of Cinemeccanica Victoria 8 or Simplex XL 35/70mm projectors, DTS, Dolby Digital, and optical soundheads, A Dolby CP200 rack, and all the trimmings in addition to the digital projection gear. For me, half the fun of movies was threading them up and doing changeovers, rewinding and threading again. It was a treat when someone else did the projecting, but I noticed every single flaw in their technique.
And get that damned table lamp out of there. WTF.
Wine room: No. Scotch collection: Yes.
Gun Room: Meh. It’s called a nightstand and a basement cupboard for all I have/want/need.
The bookshelf that is really a door, the door with no visible hinges or knobs or handles, a floor that is really an elevator. One of the founders of one of those “com companies was able to carry this to an extreme allowed by his millions. Living the life of a Hardy Boys villain.
A gun room/ wine cellar/ work room, definitely. What I really want is a basement range. It may not work out for anything more powerful than .22 mag, but if I can’t shoot cans while sitting on my back porch without neighbors getting torqued, I need an indoor range.
On a more pleasant level, I have discovered pinot noir, and back when I finally convinced my mother not to have Manachewitz with the Thanksgiving Turkey, the Sauvignon Blanc and the regrettably obscure Cabernet Franc became the tradition. Trader Joe’s has a nice Cabernet Franc.