As much as the authorities would like to ignore it, basement speakeasies have never really gone out of style. If they are hard to find, well that is the basis of their continued existence. If you can’t find one, why not start one up yourself? The art of the basement speakeasy lies in creating a comfortable environment for debauchery to take place. The basement speakeasies have a few things in common: word of mouth, comfort, and hours of operation that pick up where bars legally must leave off.
There are also many bars out there that are legal businesses and evoke the feel of a speakeasy with their decor and furniture. This kind of themed bar is the kind many would always rather go to, and if you plan on making your own basement bar at home, you should look at what others have done and use those designs to inform your building and decor process.
One of the first issues that most home bar owners have to address is the draft system. If you have a kegerator, you are in a good starting place for hosting late night soirees in your own basement bar. You will probably want a mini-fridge with a see-through door as well, for convenience’s sake. Once you have these basics covered, you can consider installing a sink for washing cups and the like.
When you are installing these items into your basement bar, thinking out of the box is going to yield some nice results. Some of the most ingenious designs have come about from changing just a couple of aspects of a draft dispensing design or changing the way the bar is built.
There are two bars in Austin, Texas that have an amazing feeling and sense of decor associated with them that are perfect examples of how to apply this speakeasy style. They are the Eastside Showroom and the Swan Dive, and the same interior designer created them both, Mickie Danae Spencer.
When you walk into the Eastside Showroom, it is just far off the main drag madness of 6th street to be comfortable. The while place looks old, although the bar only opened its doors a few years ago. The venue draws its old style feeling from a combination of exquisite custom made bar furniture, designed and built by the owner, and a lot of antique cut-ups. These cut-ups are a functional aspect of the bar build, but they all have an aspect that is modified from a vintage antique object, such as old milk cans, wine barrels, foot cranked Singer sewing machine bases, port hole windows from sailing vessels, and more.
Looking at a bar like this can give you a deep understanding of how to build something out of junk and make it look beautiful. The important thing about this aspect of design is to have a holistic approach. Take the Eastside showroom, for instance. The interior is beautiful, and most everything is vintage. Vintage cocktails, vintage wood used for the bar, and vintage music is either being played live or old recordings are being played on the stereo. Keep this in mind when designing your theme, and people will be saying – you “thought of everything”.
Using old wooden pallets is an ingenious use of used materials and generally you can find them for free. Try local plant nurseries or landscaping companies, craigslist.org, freecycle.org or hardware shops. They normally have a lot of these pallets on hand and will give them away. Reclaimed wood from old wooden pallets can be transformed into all types of furniture, flooring and wall coverings.
Another local Austin, TX hangout – whose name we cannot mention, due to issues with legality and blacking out – is a surprising example of how a space can be converted into a cute little den of iniquity with little work. This speakeasy appears to be a former neighborhood church on the outside, but once you knock and are introduced in, you have a swank living room with mostly 1960s and 70s style furniture, and a small high table that acts as a bar (on occasion), with a small selection of bottled or canned beers.
This is a place that did not even have any kind of draft system. The owner was informal and friendly to those who came in to this private club. The walls were adorned with some very eccentric odds and ends. The owner claimed that the bottles and fetishes covering the place are things he found while tearing down to rebuild one of the walls. Magical charms that had been hidden away since the old owner, who was a bit of a medicine man in the neighborhood, had passed away. The new owner handled the fetish objects respectfully, and kept them in the room that had formerly been a place for the purveyance of magical charms and elixirs as a reminder of the history of the building. Such treasures are timely and often interesting to the owners or renters of the space in question, and here is an example of how to use these items to add meaningful decor to a space.
If you do plan on dispensing draft beer in your home bar, there are a number of simple modifications you can make to your home draft system to pull it in line with you home bar’s theme. See the article entitled “Hacking Your Kegerator: An Overview of Mods and Add-ons” for more ideas on how to modify your draft tower or change the aesthetic of your kegerator.
For those more interested in drinking than decor, a few vintage or faux vintage beer signs or some neon can be enough. Sometimes the simpler route is easier, but some prefer a drinking venue that has an almost museum like quality of presentation and coziness. The last thing you want to see in a speakeasy bar is a television. This is the most disturbing and mind numbing thing a bar can do – and it seems to be the most common offense. A room full of television screens blaring at the pitiable inhabitants, who are so mesmerized by the screens that they can barely talk to each other. There are alternatives that proffer a sense of being somewhere – or, in the case of these vintage speakeasy style venues – of being somewhen.
