Home Bar Styles

There are a variety of home bar styles for your recreational room that you can choose from.  Do you want your friends to call you Gilligan when you’re serving drinks behind your tropical tiki bar?  Or, do you want to be James Bond serving martinis behind your sleek, modern themed bar?

Vegas Lounge

The Vegas lounge look is often chosen for home bars because it evokes thoughts of the 1970’s Vegas nightlife, and also because it’s a just plain fun theme. Even if you weren’t born in the 1970’s, it’s still a great theme that encourages everyone to have some fun, talk a little and just retrospect.  To get the Vegas lounge look, you’ll want to go with leather or red velvet chairs, 70’s style lighting, neon signs, and retro photos. You’ll also want to invest in a good stereo to blast out some jazz songs, and carry several different kinds of drinks. As far as the countertop of the bar is concerned, it should be a nice, dark wood and should go good with the chairs. It’s advisable to also consider putting a pool/billiards table in the bar somewhere, so that your guests can have a little fun while drinking.

The Local Pub Look

Forget the classy Vegas look—you just want a bar with atmosphere that people will love! A pub style home bar will go over well with fans of TV bars like Cheers and the Simpsons. It’s a chummy atmosphere, and works great in rooms that have dim lighting and that are close, in proximity, to a home theater or game room. To complete the Pub look, you’ll want to have shiny brass bar rails, wooden bar stools, tables, traditional pub signs and yes, even a keg and a keg tap filled with some Miller or Budweiser. You might also purchase some beer mugs, neon signs and mirrors to further the Pub look.

Tropical (Tiki) Bar Look

If you want a tropical island feel to your bar, the Tiki Bar look is definitely a great choice. It’s fun, it’s unique and it’s actually not that expensive to create. To create the Tiki Bar look in your home bar, you’ll want to purchase a couple of fake palm trees, paint the bar itself a bright color (you may even consider hiring a painter to paint a beach on the wall), use chairs and perhaps have a grass roof above the bar. To add to the fun, you might serve drinks with umbrellas in them, and use stringed-together lights for your lighting. The whole idea is to create a very beach like atmosphere. If you do that, you’ve got a great Tiki Bar.

A Modern Look

Sometimes, very “themed” looks just aren’t what you’re looking for in a home bar. In this case, a modern themed bar works out pretty well. Just use a simple metal or glass countertop, matching seating, and have plenty of space to store all of your drinks and materials underneath the countertop. The look itself is very simplistic, which means you won’t need to worry about having all kinds of decorations.

The Sports Bar

The Sports Bar look is actually a really simple, yet effective one to create. To start with, you’ll want to have a pool table or other gaming equipment in the room (a pinball machine or dart board works great).  Sports logos are an absolute must, so decorate the bar with photos of your favorite sports teams—autographed sports memorabilia works great—and have a wood countertop with wooden stools to match.  If you have a massive plasma or projection, that can work as your bar’s focal point — if you don’t want to take up that much room though, you could wall-mount a 27″ or 35″ TV in one of the corners.