Luxury Home Bar Ideas

Building a home bar into an interior design plan can be as complex or straightforward as you like. If you want it to melt into the rest of the room and not dominate, treat it as a piece of occasional furniture that will slot in easily, much like a console table would.

On the other hand, if your home bar plans are much bigger and bolder, consider a bespoke commission that will transform your entire room into something that people will be forming a queue outside of.

This is the most extravagant of home bar decor ideas when it comes to scale. A built-in home bar is anything but run-of-the-mill in domestic interiors. It replicates what you’d see when going out for drinks—a tall counter with fully-stocked fridges and shelves behind and perhaps stools on the other side.

It’s for serious entertaining, which is what makes it better suited to a part of the home whose sole mission is to host. Put a built-in home bar in a living room or dining room and it’s hard for any other activity to take place because it absorbs all focus. Keep this sort of design for additional reception rooms or basement excavations that have been turned into games rooms. It’s a path to establishing your house as the ultimate party pad.

The only downside with a home bar like this is that it very much marks you as being the host. As soon as you put up a taller counter, it acts as a barrier that might put people off helping themselves to drinks. If that’s something you want to avoid, go for a lower height and use lots of mirrors around the room which will make your room feel much more open and all of the zones within it more connected.

One level down from built-in designs and one level up from the drinks trolley is a liquor cabinet. These are still a larger piece of furniture to bring into the room, making a sizeable contribution to how you’re furnishing the space, but they don’t shout out what their function is, which helps them to stay under the radar.

Lots of drinks cabinets are taller, with an open base and then the storage section starting from about hip height. This is very much an Art Deco aesthetic. Stay on that luxury home bar theme by picking high-gloss, polished materials or lavish metallics like brass or copper cladding. Or, head down the more classic route by choosing wooden cabinets that could be mistaken for an antique.

Perhaps the most trend-led of all the home bar options, drinks trolleys actually hark back to Victorian era tea carts. The same design later evolved into cocktail carts in the 1920s, before being cemented as a drinks showcase in the 1950s. It’s why so many of the designs fuse the glamorous material mixes (like antiqued mirror and bronze) of the 20s and 30s with angular, minimal form—it’s a Mid-Century meets Deco look. The popular TV series Mad Men glamourised and popularised them further with its use of curvilinear bar trollies in almost every episode, helping this entertaining essential to regain its stardom.

What makes a drinks trolley so appealing is how it’s so easy to fit in to any sized room. They’ll gladly sit like a side table, or, if you want to make it a bigger focus, position it in the room like a console table or chest and place an oversized mirror behind it. And being smaller in size, they’re one of the best home bar ideas on a budget.

You could even take a drinks trolley into the bathroom, but instead of displaying bottles of liquor on it, you’d keep bottles of cosmetics, bath oils and salts and bundles of towels on the lowermost shelf.

Style and location sorted, the final talking point is home bar decor, which can elevate it considerably. A beautiful bar trolley is quickly undone if it’s stocked with an uncoordinated assortment of glasses and uninspiring collection of bottles. The secret is to show just a sample of what’s on offer. This means that when people flock it—which they will because a home bar is like a moth to a flame – they’ll see the span of drinks and the different types of glassware revealing that you know your stuff when it comes to entertaining.

If there’s a space for wine glasses then include them, but prioritise tumblers for short servings like a Negroni and Old Fashioned, a few high-ball tumblers for long cocktails and Martini glasses or champagne coupes or saucers as they’re a vintage touch that complements the theme. The same goes for decanters, cocktail shakers and ice buckets—fit them in if you can because a home bar is often the only place where you’ll realistically be able to show them off.