Forbidden Pleasures: The Rebirth of Private Smoking Rooms

From Matthew Temple, Financial Times:

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.

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