“I see home bars as quite an English thing and one of the things I love the most about the English,” says Swedish-born interior designer Beata Heuman, “so I almost always put a ‘bar moment’ in my projects.” In her own home, that moment is tucked within the built-in shelving in her sitting room, in the form of a small glazed cabinet, surrounded by books – a clever idea for those who are short on space elsewhere. Brass countertops and antique-mirror backing complete the glamorous effect, bounce light back into the room, and, as Barlow puts it, “really bring the party vibes into the house”. In this dining room (above), she designed bar furniture for the alcoves on each side of the fireplace, and had them painted with a tortoiseshell effect by specialist painter Malcolm Scoular. “Bespoke joinery is a great way to fit a bar into an existing interior, as you can work with a carpenter to design something that will fit seamlessly into any space,” says interior designer Lucy Barlow (), who has designed bars to fit into fireplace alcoves, or the slim slice of wall between two windows in a sitting room. “It’s the perfect place to store my quite large and growing glass collection,” she says, “but it has also definitely encouraged lots of cocktail making – and drinking.” Make use of an alcove The bar has been tailored to fit the space, with all the essentials – a marble worktop with a fridge and bottle rack below and shelves for glassware above – and Dickinson has painted the joinery in a deep-blue gloss and papered the walls in Mr Men wallpaper by Howe, to create “a jewel box of a room” with plenty of wow factor. She designed panelling to clad the walls between the sitting room and kitchen, and incorporated a jib door with a push latch, so that the drinks cabinet is hidden within the panelling when not in use. “It made sense to me to keep a little space here in between the sitting room and kitchen, which allowed us to make a utility room on one side of the doorway, and a secret drinks cabinet on the other.” “There was previously a downstairs loo here that you accessed from the hallway, which we moved to under the stairs,” she says. When interior designer Octavia Dickinson () bought her house and extended the kitchen, she took the opportunity to create a clever “interhall” area of built-in joinery between the sitting room at the front and the kitchen at the rear. One night a week sitting with an old-fashioned or a margarita in your hand and a bowl of olives on the bar can make you feel a little more like the glamorous ‘you’ in your head – not to mention it’s a change of scenery from the home office.”Īt a time when zoning is the watchword in interiors, installing built-in cabinetry to house a bar can be a practical choice in terms of home organisation, providing somewhere to keep all your glasses, bar accessories and bottles in one place, rather than scattered between various drawers and cupboards. “If you have the space, a home bar feels like a slightly louche enclave to escape to after a week of trudging. “I think people are trying to future-proof their own entertainment,” adds Audrey Carden. “You might think you’d need a lot of space for a bar, but you can keep it really simple, and make use of an alcove or nook.” “We’ve had a lot of requests to adapt rooms for this reason,” says Eleanora Cunietti. Interior designers Carden Cunietti have found that although its clients are now going out to bars and restaurants, they also want the option of entertaining at home, and are keen to create a restaurant-style aesthetic to impress their guests. Interior designers are also seeing sustained demand for bars to be factored into living spaces, as clients make use of cocktail-making skills honed during lockdown and take inspiration from rooms they have spotted on Instagram and Pinterest. Rated People’s 2022 trends report, which surveyed over 2,000 people and analysed over 850,000 jobs posted on the site, lists home bars as sixth on the list of priorities for UK homeowners this year – ahead of home gyms and new kitchens – and predicts that the average spend on a home bar will be just over £13,000. And although bars and pubs have long since reopened, it’s a trend that doesn’t appear to be slowing down. And now that entertaining at home is fully back on the cards, home bars are in more demand than ever.Ģ022 research by the online spirits retailer Clink showed that over 2.7 million British households have installed some kind of bar over the past two years, collectively spending over £2.2 billion. Whether it’s a dedicated room, a built-in nook or a cocktail table, a drinks area is a welcoming signal that it’s time to relax and say goodbye to the working day. When it comes to bringing the “wow factor” to a room, nothing packs quite as much of a punch as a well-stocked home bar.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |