The interior walls do not have baseboards. “It’s just drywall right down to the floor. That clean European look may sound like less work, but it can be more work because you can’t hide anything,” Hanna says. “Also, with no baseboards, if someone kicks the bottom of the wall, they could put a hole in it.” To protect the lower section of the wall, the crew installed plywood blocking between the studs on the bottom 6 inches.

Skaptason says that all the granite for the house came from Italy. It was more cost-effective for the owners to purchase it in Europe and ship it to Boston. Since the owners had a large container full of the stone, Hanna says they used it throughout the house. “It’s used in the basement — even the mechanical room has granite tile,” he says.

Other containers from Iceland held the cabinetry and wine shelves, all installed by the Icelandic crew.

Higher Power

The original design, approved by the historic board, included installing a garage under the terrace. The homeowners also wanted a glass wall in the garage so that they could have a view of the wine cellar as they drove in. However, the ground water was too high, and adding pumps to periodically remove any collected water would have been prohibitively expensive and would have extended the already tight schedule.

Though S+H Construction dug the basement during the 1998 remodel to bring the basement’s ceiling height from about 5 feet to 7 feet, during this remodel, the owners asked for another dig to raise the ceiling to 8 feet 5 inches and expand the square footage to add a wine cellar. (See “The Big Dig,” below.)

In addition to wine storage and a tasting room, the new basement has a pantry, storage, a mechanical room, a powder room, and a small sitting area.

The wine shelves, designed by Skaptason, are made of a curved aluminum roofing material. “It fit every type of bottle shape. I used that as a base and added extra elements to make it functional,” he says.

The mechanical room takes up about a quarter of the basement and includes the infrastructure for the Crestron Electronics smart-house system that controls the home’s HVAC, music, water temperature, and window blinds. The owners requested that a large gas generator be installed behind the garage outbuilding to power the entire system in case of a power outage. Custom detailing by Hanna’s crew hides the shades and motors behind the window casings.

Touchscreen keypads are mounted on the wall in the living areas and bedrooms, but the homeowners can also control the system using their laptops. “We’ve done smaller systems, but we’ve never installed one like this,” Hanna says. Skaptason says that the client’s house in Iceland has some smart features, but this project is much more technical. “It took the specialist months to program the whole thing,” he says.

The Big Dig

Remodeler Doug Hanna of S+H Construction, in Cambridge, Mass., says that clients are increasingly asking him to add ceiling height to their basements to make them more comfortable living spaces. “With houses in a tight urban setting, you can’t expand outward or upward. There is one place you can expand — down,” he says.

Part of the reason for this is the size restrictions imposed on homes in some Cambridge neighborhoods. Houses in certain zones are limited to a .5 floor area ratio (FAR). This means that a house on a 5,000-square-foot lot can only have 2,500 square feet of living space, which is defined at a height of 7 feet or over. “If you have a 5-foot-high basement, you can dig down to create a ceiling height of 6 feet 11 inches and still walk around comfortably, but that is not included in the FAR,” Hanna explains.

He says that basement excavations help homeowners work around the zone restrictions and allow them to squeeze as much square footage out of their houses as possible.

Limited living space was not an issue for this house, where the lot was large enough to allow for the deeper basement. S+H Construction crews usually do the work in smaller projects, but Hanna prefers to use a subcontractor for larger jobs.

For another project, Hanna’s crew found an underground stream during a basement excavation. “We diverted it into a large pipe and put a catch basin in the back that led to another stream,” he says, a decision that cost the homeowner $70,000. —Nina Patel