My wine cellar (storage space under the stairs) has all but been converted into a loo. I am left with a fraction of the wine space, accessible from a cupboard door by the 'throne'.

The few bottles of wine I could store in there would have to endure a flatulent toxic atmosphere. They would also have to put up with warmth from a heated towel rail, and the vibrations from the big flush button on the cistern (all modern loos seem to give you a choice these days. I liked the simplicity of the 'one flush fits all', as there are way too many other decisions to make in life, mostly in fact made on the loo. The two buttons never come with a flush categorisation chart for clarity. It could be a bit like those naff pictures of dishes outside restaurants in dodgy holiday resorts).
A wine collection in my new WC would suffer the same incongruous ride as the Huygens space probe entering Titan's atmosphere, with its thick methane clouds.
Damp towels, a parky loo and a sign saying 'no number twos' are way more favourable than damaging my wine, but I am not the only one living in the house. I need a plan B for wine storage.
In the summer my garage is the 'cooler' in the film 'The Great Escape', you could fry an egg on the floor. In the winter the cobwebs freeze. I cannot afford to convert part of it to some swanky temperature and humidity controlled walk-in wine cellar.
As far as the kitchen goes, I find electric chilled wine cabinets really vulgar looking. They may be practical and gain respect from some visiting wine buffs, but they take away the organic beauty of the wine collection, and present it as a dull predictable amorphous mass of sealed plastic. Some of them look like coffins. You never know whether you are going to pull out a long dead relative or a nice claret. They are about as inspiring and predictable as a screw top plastic wine bottle.
All I want is to stumble upon a bottle covered in dust in my own deep imaginary cellar (candle in hand).
Caves rule in wine storage and have an interesting history. The Romans used to store their wine in catacombs (so they really had to be careful what they pulled out), and the French first used crayeres (old Roman limestone excavations for building material). Nowadays man-made caves built for storing wine are common place all over the world.
Caves are naturally perfect for the job. High humidity, low light, low vibration, and cool temperatures. In fact everything my WC is not.
The perfect temperature for storing wine is around 55 degrees F (13 degrees C), and that is a big ask in my house. To put that in perspective, in Great Britain 16 degrees C is the legal minimum working temperature for office type work, and 13 degrees is for work with some physical activity. So in my mind wine is recommended to exist 'on the edge', on the limit of human endurance. This tells me any living space in my house is not going to cut it.
Looking into this a bit more it would seem that wine at room temperature in the house (in a cool dark place) can be ok for a couple of years. If you want to get serious though, and store quality wines for decades, then 55 degrees F all the way. Varying temperatures promote different subtle changes in the wine, some good and some bad. This is why solid cellaring is so crucial to the outcome. Big temperature fluctuations are one of your worst enemies.
I class myself as a casual wine drinker, storing a small collection for dinner parties and the odd bottle for two to three years. Therefore I think the cupboard in the hall sounds a good bet for now.

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