When I mention to people that I have written a book about home bars, the most common response is, ‘my parents/grandparents/swinging uncle used to have one of those globe cocktail cabinets’. The other thing they mention is Only Fools and Horses. For years, having a bar in your home was seen as the height of bad taste.
It’s a far cry from the home bar’s 1950s heyday. After the second world war, people were spending more time at home, but still wanted to lead the cocktail lifestyle. It was the suburban American dream: after a hard day’s work, drive home in your shiny new Chevrolet, put Frank Sinatra’s Songs for Swingin’ Lovers on your state-of-the-art hi-fi while your wife knocks you up a martini at your home bar. In austerity Britain, we had to make do with a Morris Minor and Scandinavian–inspired cocktail cabinets bought on hire purchase.
As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, minimalism started to go out of fashion and interior design became more riotous. We can see the change from a film like Sabrina (1954) where Humphrey Bogart makes Audrey Hepburn a daiquiri from his sleek mid–century sideboard in probably cinema’s greatest office, to Anne Bancroft trying to seduce Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate (1967) at a kitsch home bar with a big glowing sign on saying ‘bar’. From there it’s just a small step to 1978’s Foul Play, in which Dudley Moore plays a swinger with a piano that turns into a (let’s face it, completely fabulous) bar. Home bars became the subject of derision. Eventually they were relegated to the garage or shed.
Tastes had changed. The aspirant middle classes were turning to wine. When I was growing up in the 1980s, only older people drank spirits before a meal.
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