Former Pentridge Prison cells are being sold off for $115,000 each as ritzy wine cellars. 

For more than a century Pentridge Prison’s D Division, in the Melbourne suburb of Coburg, was a temporary home to remand prisoners including Squizzy Taylor and Mark ‘Chopper’ Read.

It closed in 1997 and has recently been repurposed as Pentridge Cellars by wine enthusiasts Paul Tardivel and Michael Woodworth.

The pair bought the heritage bluestone building last year for $4.5 million price tag and are refitting the 3m x 2m cells with wine racks and climate control systems.

“Giving these old bluestone walls new life has been our goal since we first visited the site back in 2015, the owners said. “We could see right away how uniquely suited to wine storage it was and how, given some carefully considered upgrades, we could create a boutique storage solution for any serious collector of fine wine”

Woodworth added to News Corp that the cellars were targetted at “well-heeled wine lovers”, who perhaps lived in apartments in central Melbourne with no place to store their collections.

The buyers will pay an annual strata fee of about $180 and have 24-hour access to their cellars, which will be monitored by CCTV.

While there are almost 200 cells in D Division, with 34 privately owned as wine cellars, Pentridge Cellars only plans to sell 20 more, with the rest to be rented to winemakers as “pop up stores”.