Home bars are now making a comeback – minus the 1970s-style wood paneling and mirrored cabinet doors. Among certain groups of homeowners there is sort of a martini and cocktail revival, with staying in becoming the new going out.
Today’s home bars come in two packages: either you can have a whole room bar, or you can buy a piece of furniture that is a bar and fit it into your existing room, says Paul DeFeis, senior managing partner at Trade Mark Design & Build, whose firm specializes in home bar installation, among other projects.
Wet Bars vs Dry Bars
Wet bars in living room are becoming more popular as people want to have beverages close to where they spend a lot of their time, DeFeis says. They also want a small fridge and perhaps a microwave oven for convenience and to assist them with their entertaining requirements. Homeowners are taking advantage of the home bar renaissance because their houses can be so large that they find it difficult to access the kitchen.
Installing a wet bar, however, can be difficult as it requires opening up a wall and connecting up the plumbing, as well as a host of inspections. It can be more time-consuming as planning can take several weeks, along with several weeks more at least for construction to be carried out. A dry bar, on the other hand, can be installed in one day with no inspections.
Custom Cabinetry Build
Building the bar itself is a similar process to any custom cabinetry build. It would start with identifying the client’s needs, or the type of scenario they would like. For a start, they need to decide whether they want their bar to be light purpose or heavy purpose. Some people, for example, want to have a full working bar like the one on the television program Cheers, where they can actually hire fully professional bartenders for parties. Others just want a small piece of furniture to fit in with their existing décor.
Other considerations include:
- How much liquor you are storing, or plan to store. If you want a small bar in your existing living room, for example, the liquor storage requirements would most likely be considerably smaller than if you want to transform an entire separate room into an individual bar.
- If they are any temperature requirements with wine. If there are, you might choose to have a wine room in the basement or in a cool dry space, or to have individual refrigeration units in the bar or in a wine room. That would depend on the type of wine, the value of the wine, and how you expect the system to perform. If you have a rare wine collection of extremely high value, you’d need backup generators so everything stays stable in a power outage.
- The staff requirements. If there is a staff, it’s a good idea to interview the bartender or other staff members to see how they like to serve people, what their set-up is etc. You’d then seek to create an environment that would be comfortable for that person to work in.
- Choice of standard material choices, such as countertops. Obviously that can fluctuate wildly, so you’d have to have a good idea of what you want in mind, or what your budget will allow.
Home bars can transform a home, making it the focal point of entertaining and attracting more people to your home. One client, DeFeis says, asked for a bar to be designed around an annual party he throws every year, with a professional bartender on staff. Bars appeal to virtually everyone, and there is a certain crowd that definitely likes the bar scene to be replicated within their own house.
