Golden Age Wine / David Baker Architects

Tucked into a neighborhood retail street in Birmingham, Alabama, Golden Age Wine is an unexpected find. The 2,000-sf wine shop is the first in the state to offer natural wine by the glass and bottle. The Golden Age proprietors wanted the flexibility to showcase an unrivaled selection of more than 800 natural wines in a space that captures the honesty, sustainability, and beauty of this growing movement. Adaptive reuse of an original 1962 building, the space had great bones that had been covered up through the years. A dropped acoustic-tile ceiling hung down past the storefront windows, the interior was clad in bumpy drywall, and the concrete floor was obscured by dark brown polish. The new design opened the ceiling to full height, smoothed the walls, ground the floor surface down to its original aggregate, and reorganized the interior space.