A trompe l'oeil painting adorns one wall of the wine cellar in Ron Elgin's Magnolia home. Trompe l'oeil is French for "trick the eye," and it's not the only illusion chez Elgin.

A secret spot in the wall molding releases a door to another and larger cellar, Elgin's covert reserves.

Elgin, founder of DDB Communications, says the architect who designed it joked it could be a place to keep "the cheap stuff." But Ron and Bonnie Elgin only collect fine wine, and plenty of it. Some 6,000 bottles line the cellars of the home they built 13 years ago on Seattle's tony Perkins Lane. And these days, they keep the door to the inner cellar propped open all the time.

The secret is out. Wine cellars like the Elgins' are fast becoming the hallmark of a gracious home.

Consider the Mercer Island mega-mansion owned by real estate and retirement community moguls Chuck and Karen Lytle. The opulent estate, currently on the market for $34.9 million, boasts a pair of exquisitely organized cellars outfitted with a state-of-the-art climate control system. Should it fail, an alarm will sound and alert the system's service team. The couple also installed a backup generator to protect the 6,000 bottles of wine that Chuck Lytle estimates are worth roughly $1 million.

Lytle says bottles of wine, like any collection, should be lived with, not locked away. He has stored wine off-site, but it "just wasn't as much fun," he says.

Elgin agrees. "I can't even envision the idea of renting a wine storage unit. I like to walk into my wine cellar and surprise myself at what I'm going to pull."

Such serendipity confers a certain responsibility: "When you've got that much wine, you've got to take care of it," says veteran collector Mel Sturman.

He should know. The retired plastic surgeon can choose from nearly 10,000 bottles stored in the wine cellar of his Burien home. Sturman calls it a "working cellar," as in, he's still working on getting each bottle in the right place.

"People who collect wine have a propensity to fill their houses up," he says. "What happens is, there's wine boxes all over the place; it's hard to be that disciplined when you're that passionate about it."

It's a passion that can overwhelm even the most ardent oenophile.

"Someone did the math for me one time," Elgin says. "If we were to drink a bottle a day, that's 300 bottles a year, so it would take 10, 15, 20 years to drink the bottles we have now. That's ridiculous, because you can't stop buying."

Enter Kevin Pettit, whose custom wine cellar business, Vintage Solutions, puts passion in a safe, climate-controlled place.

A contractor, collector and home winemaker, Pettit built his first wine cellar in 1998 for a friend's West Seattle home. He got the next job soon afterward, when he whipped out his digital camera at a wine shop to show pictures of his first project.

Since then Pettit's business has grown like Vitis vinifera in the Columbia Valley. Clients have started coming to him with increasingly sophisticated cellar plans, including custom mahogany racks and matching tasting tables.

As a luxury home amenity, cellars hold universal appeal, Pettit says.

"Everyone wants a wine cellar to some extent. I swear I've built wine cellars for people who don't even drink wine."

Demand for wine cellars is trickling into the mainstream. "It used to be primarily in the high-end home, but now it's more affordable with the environmental control systems being less cumbersome and easier to install," says Stuart Miner, a real estate agent with Windermere in Seattle.