We are in love with one of our cocktail bars that we have in the shop right now. It’s a real beauty and we reckon it would make a fab counter for a vintage shop or for a restaurant/café.
It is a large size with a display window for your vintage glasses and a flat top for your ice bucket!
Behind there are shelves for your bottles as well as a bottle opener and towel ring for your bar towel.
We love the black vinyl front with grid of teak creating a grid design.
These bars were popular in the 1950s, although some homes had them as early as the 1920s. These were more cabinets than bars though.
“In the 1950s families loved spending a week in holiday camps. Butlins was the favourite with millions of people holidaying there every year. The bar was not only a place to relax and enjoy a tipple, but somewhere you could truly escape British life. Often decorated as a tropical Hawaiian beach hut complete with hula girls and pineapple ice buckets, holiday makers chose to recreate this look on return home.
Frosted coloured glasses with gold rims in different shapes and sizes were bought to sit inside a cocktail cabinet. These had glass shelves with vinyl images and mirrors attached to the sliding glass doors. Families chose a free standing bar with short splayed legs. These often had compartments for cocktail sticks, holes for your bottles and even inbuilt lemon squeezers for your juices. On the top was a selection of accessories such as a soda syphon and a fruit shaped ice bucket: pineapples from Britvic or apples and pears with glass inners and matching glasses.
A must have item for your vintage bar are Babycham glasses. In 1953 there was a gap in the market for alcoholic drinks for young ladies. Men drank sherry, whisky and ale; women drank gin and Crème de Menthe. Babycham was perceived as fun, sparkly even aspirational and with the introduction of the deer brand image, the young lady finally found her tipple.”
–Style Your Modern Vintage Home, Kate Beavis
We have a cream vinyl bar with splayed legs and teak vertical strips. It houses our record player and CD player…like a retro DJ booth!
You can buy the black retro bar here
