I have worked on quite a few hotel and golf clubhouse projects in my time and always included is a bar. A social gathering place, to rest your feet maybe after a long day or to break the day with maybe a spot of lunch and a glass of fizz. In recent times though (the past two years) I have been asked to design two bars with different credentials for residential homes. A new trend that’s slowly been gathering legs for possibly the last 4 years maybe, but how exciting from a designer’s perspective, bars for people homes.

Now I go back to my comment “different credentials”.  Each bar was completely different, but the same goal was requested, we want somewhere to mix a drink properly with theatre and a little bit of extravagance. This one statement sums up what a bar in a home should be for me with maybe a little bit of crazy in there. Having said that there has to be an element of practical too, wipeable surfaces, somewhere to store ice, possibly a fridge and a sink. So, my first home bar was actually a request for a cocktail cabinet. My clients did have an existing drinks cabinet as such, which Mr. bought and loved and Mrs. Really disliked.  And honestly, I had to agree with Mrs it was an adapted wardrobe, see my photos and tell me what you think? Off we went on this exciting journey of drinking companion discovery.

There we so many choices but in the end, they opted for a faux suede style finish with an intricate cut out design in hot pink. OK so hot pink not the first choice for most but this was sitting against a beautiful navy coloured grass cloth wallpaper and this was going to zing. It was going to be mirror lined with internal lights, glass shelves, drawers for little bits of cocktail paraphernalia and all sitting on an antique bronze metal frame.  And as Craig Revel Horwood would say “gorgeous darling” possibly followed by “mines a French Martini darling”. It ticked all the boxes, glamorous, fun, practical and most of all it was theatre in all its glory. My second bar was to be an up-cycle of a piece of fitted Victorian furniture that was being removed from one part of a house I was working on to be used for the drink's cabinet in the new bar.

In the end we only used the top section as the bottom part wasn’t well made enough and did cope well when removing. But the top section we managed to keep the façade with the cornice & make a new back which gave it so much more stability. We added lights in the central cupboard with shaped shelves for bottles & the other two cupboards housed glasses & everything else. We decided on a purple exterior with an orange interior. We wanted to have a relatively sedate outer colour with a brilliant shock when you opened the cupboards, we also decided on a very high gloss finish. This meant it was easy to keep clean & would hold up to knocks from bottles or ice buckets. The final touch was to add different handles, nothing matching. We have a Rhino next to glass next to a brass swallow next to a leather strap……… all adding elements of fun to what our client wanted “a fun, theatrical piece” and I think we achieved that.