Forbidden Pleasures: The Rebirth of Private Smoking Rooms

A mansion on Sands Point, Long Island, is an unlikely setting for social rebellion. But while the rest of New York State was stubbed out with smoking bans, that was where interior designer Jamie Gibbs created his first smoking room.

With dark English walnut wall panels, oriental rugs and bookcases fronted with brass grilles, it was commissioned by a Wall Street cigar aficionado who wanted “an image of old fashioned machismo” and was successful enough to render the opinion of others irrelevant. “When every newspaper and every doctor is telling you not to smoke there’s a certain decadence when you not only smoke, you create a space to do it in,” Gibbs says.

After Sands Point came smoking dens in Manhattan and Montclair, New Jersey, and a few spots in between, many prompted by bans, (perhaps inspired by the smoking tent Arnold Schwarzenegger erected on the lawn of the California governor’s mansion) and all capturing a feel Gibbs calls “private speakeasy”, a mix of the forbidden and the historic.

In spite of his reputation for original thinking, Gibbs, who teaches at Parsons School of Design in New York, believes a smoking room is one place that can’t escape its past, including grand examples in mansions such as Biltmore, the Vanderbilts’ 250-room “chateau” in North Carolina. Just as “brandy comes in a snifter”, “cigars come in wood-panelled rooms”, he says, even if those panels now hide plasma television screens and mini-bars. The new smoking rooms are not places of “quiet money” but they reveal a man who appreciates fine things. “He’s not passing himself off as sixth-generation wealthy; he’s more robber baron than titled individual,” Gibbs explains.

It’s a notion familiar to property developer Mark Wilson, although he prefers “wealthy bear” to robber baron. His company, London Bay Homes, decorates Florida’s south-west coast with luxury apartments, villas and mansions, some of which have custom-built smoking rooms.

The demographic is clear: an avid cigar smoker, a wife who “can’t stand the smell”, and “such wealth that when they want something they just have it”. The last London Bay smoking room cost $200,000. Sometimes clients want the wood-panelled club look; sometimes, a more open Florida feel. Whatever the style, it matches the luxury elsewhere: “It’s no hole in the wall. They don’t hold back.”

Adding value isn’t the game; in Florida at least, smoking rooms aren’t up there with en suite bathrooms. It’s more a case of macho cachet: “When they’ve got a couple of buddies ’round, it’s a show-off place,” Wilson says. That place, apparently, is becoming universal.

Graham Ward, a managing director of two companies, lives in a converted 19th-century farm building in Warwickshire with a classic interior: stripped oak beams, slate floors, inglenooks and a 6ft mahogany humidor. When talk of a smoking ban reached Britain, Ward, a cigar smokers’ champion, built a citadel off the dining room, what he calls a “haven”. The room keeps to the bucolic atmosphere of the house, with exposed brickwork, green oak roof trusses, wood-burner, and so on. The furniture is leather: “It complements the cigar aroma.”

These days, Ward and his wife (genteel cigarillos not Havanas) spend most nights in there, and he swears it enhances the smoking experience. He can admire his cigar collection (“Even the boxes are ornate”), puff away, “not feel ostracised” and, like those wealthy bears on the Florida coast, remind himself that he has the money to do exactly what he wants. “As you get older you look for things you regard as signs of success,” he says. A collection of 1,500 cigars is one thing (“It’s not that many,” he insists); a room to smoke them in another.

Adrian Lesley, who sells luxury cigars and bespoke humidors through south-west London’s Cigars Unlimited, is one beneficiary of the trend toward smokers creating havens in their homes and the backlash against bans. A while back, a man commissioned a humidor in oak. He liked it so much he asked for a matching desk. Then a chair. Then display cabinets for his steam engines. Then an extension for the desk to house his computer.

The humidor as furniture (or art) is not a new idea but private smoke rooms have made them more common, Lesley says, with individuals copying the lavish examples they’ve seen at clubs and hotels – the Makassar ebony and mother-of-pearl pastiche of a 1920s design by Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann that he created for Claridges, say, or the 2-metre tall double humidor (ebony and Santos rosewood) in the lobby of Morton’s club, Berkeley Square. A model inspired by an Italian cubist design, decorated with hundreds of inlaid numbers, was snapped up by Madonna.

Once in a while Lesley designs whole-room humidors such as that in his Fulham store: “There are technical limitations. But where there’s a will . . . ”

Joel Sherman, heir to Nat Sherman, whose Broadway cigar store was a meeting place for 1930s New York City gangsters and showbiz types, thinks the rise of smoking rooms is a reaction against the demise of traditional male hideouts in American homes. Smoking is a “reason for men to develop their own private den”, shut off from health-conscious spouses and children, he explains. “Smoking labels it as ‘stay out’.”

Status is key: “A smoking room says ‘I’m better than the Joneses’.”

Sherman is proud of his smoking room. “It’s called my office,” he says. Occasionally, former New York mayor Rudi Giuliani, a victim of the city’s smoking ban, pops around for a crafty puff and a few minutes of a Yankees game.

For the man who wants to savour cigars unhindered but can’t stretch to a private oasis, Sherman has this advice: “Buy a dog and take long walks.”

Posted on Saturday, November 26th, 2005 at 7:43 am.