Cigar Storage
Walk-In Cigar Rooms
A cigar room is a small, sealed, cedar-lined building inside a building. Get the envelope right and the plant has almost nothing to do. Get it wrong and no amount of equipment will hold it.
Most of what goes wrong in a walk-in humidor is decided before anyone orders a humidifier. A room at seventy per cent relative humidity sitting inside a house at forty-five is under constant pressure to give its moisture up, and it will give it up through every gap, every un-taped junction and every cold surface it can find. The joinery is what stops that happening, which is why we would rather build the room than be handed one to line.
The envelope
We work from the structure outwards. The room needs continuous insulation and a properly detailed vapour control layer on the warm side of it, sealed at every junction, at the ceiling and under the floor as well as on the walls. Any cold surface inside the sealed volume is a condensation site, so thermal bridges matter here in a way they do not in an ordinary fitted room. Where the room sits against an outside wall, or under a cold roof, that build-up wants proper thought and usually a conversation with the architect or the M&E consultant rather than a rule of thumb.
Inside that, the cedar. Solid Spanish cedar lining, unfinished, conditioned before it is fixed and hung so it can move, not glued rigid to a substrate that will not move with it. Nothing is applied to it. The room smells of cedar because it is cedar, not because something has been sprayed on.
The door
The door is the part that usually fails, and it is the part we care most about. It wants to be a heavy, stable, insulated leaf with a compression seal on all four edges and hardware that pulls it onto that seal rather than holding it near it — the same thinking we use on a firearms door, for the same reason. A glazed vision panel is double or triple glazed with a warm edge, because a single sheet of cold glass in a humidified room is a dehumidifier with a handle on it.
Shelving, trays and how the room is used
Cigars want to be reachable without being handled twice. We build sliding cedar trays at working height for singles, open shelving above for standing factory boxes, and deeper storage low down for the boxes being laid down and not touched. Every tray runs on cedar runners with three or four millimetres of clearance; there are no metal runners inside the room. Everything is set out with air gaps front and back so the room breathes round the stock rather than past the front of it.
Lighting is low-voltage, run cool, switched so it is off when the door is shut, and never a warm fitting sitting over stock. Seating, a table and somewhere to put a glass matter more than people expect: a room nobody wants to stand in gets used as a cupboard.
Climate
We work to sixty-eight to seventy per cent relative humidity at eighteen to twenty degrees, and we design for stability rather than for a number on a display. A room that swings between sixty-two and seventy-six every day is worse for cigars than a room that sits quietly at sixty-six. Humidification and any cooling sit outside the finished lining, feeding the room through grilles, with the plant reachable for service without dismantling joinery — and with the controls and the sensor placed where they read the room rather than the air coming out of a vent.
Plant selection and any refrigeration or ducting is specialist work and we bring in the right people for it. What we take responsibility for is the box it all sits in, the lining, the door, the shelving and the way the two trades meet.
Smoking in the room is a separate question
Storing cigars and smoking them want opposite things from the air. A storage room is sealed and still; a smoking room needs air changed and filtered and kept out of the rest of the house. Where a client wants both, we usually end up with a humidified store opening off a smoking room rather than one space trying to do both jobs. That is dealt with on the ventilation and filtration page.
Guide price
A walk-in room, lined, sealed, doored, shelved and commissioned, starts at around £15,000 including VAT and rises with size, plant and how much building work sits underneath it. We will give you a proper figure once we have seen the space or the drawings.
Cigar cabinets and humidor tables · Ventilation and filtration · Fitted gun rooms · How a commission works
Questions we are asked
What actually makes a walk-in humidor work?
The envelope, not the plant. A room at seventy per cent relative humidity sitting inside a house at forty-five is under constant pressure to give its moisture up, and it will give it up through every gap, every un-taped junction and every cold surface it can find. Get the envelope right and the plant has almost nothing to do.
What is the room lined with?
Solid Spanish cedar, unfinished, conditioned before it is fixed and hung so it can move rather than glued rigid to a substrate that will not move with it. Nothing is applied to it — the room smells of cedar because it is cedar.
Why does the door matter more than anything else?
It is the part that usually fails. It wants to be a heavy, stable, insulated leaf with a compression seal on all four edges and hardware that pulls it onto that seal rather than holding it near it. A glazed vision panel is double or triple glazed with a warm edge, because a single sheet of cold glass in a humidified room is a dehumidifier with a handle on it.
Humidity, seasoning and holding sixty-eight — why steadiness matters more than the number.
Cedar, and what it actually does — the lining that makes the room work.