Homemade bar goes viral on the networks, but has no chance of returning to fashion

The bar has lived more glorious times in our homes. Maybe not cocktails — after all, if a few years ago everyone wanted to be a chef, even if it was on television, today a lot of people want to be a bartender and homemade drinks are a real rage. Videos teaching the secret of the perfect ice for the Negroni or how to choose the best gin for your martini are multiplying on the networks.

But cool your glass for a moment. While the homemade drinks are better – although there is room for improvement –, the domestic bars where they were prepared and served are no longer enjoying their glory days. Not mahogany. It just seems like there are people missing.

In recent weeks, a post has gone viral on social media, leaving many curious and nostalgic. Attributed to the arroba @satansanto, it described common furniture in Brazilian homes in the 1970s and 1980s.

“Every living room had a ‘bar’: counter, two high stools, a back cabinet, sometimes mirrored, with support for hanging glasses upside down. It was like having a bartender to serve people at home”, remembered the post.

Those who lived at the time rushed to remember, with a keen affective memory, the large wooden furniture that imitated bars and occupied a generous space in the “guest” room.

Nothing like the improvised trays and carts currently used to place drinking utensils at home. Real bars, which used to occupy about 10 m2.

Does the virality of the subject predict a return of wooden bars (mahogany has become increasingly rare and more expensive) washed down with scotch, liqueurs and shot glasses of sandblasted crystal?

Architect Larissa Burke assures us that it doesn’t — at least not in the old-fashioned way. A partner at Futura Studio, which designs several bars in the city of São Paulo, she says that these huge pieces of furniture no longer have space — neither in homes nor in society.

“The cultural difference is very big. 40, 50 years ago, people didn’t have the habit of going out drinking so much, so having friends at home was more common, and these pieces of furniture fulfilled this role within the architecture of the time. for the men of the house, drinking scotch and smoking cigars”, he evaluates.

“From the 1990s onwards, this declined because habits changed, the offers to consume outside the home increased, and the bar fell into disuse.”

The changes brought yet another transformation in domestic environments: space. The size of the furniture back then would take up half the size of many apartments sold today.

“People realized that they didn’t need to occupy such a large and valuable space with something that was almost not used in the house. Many bars ended up coming to the junkyard, and they were being used less and less”, says architect Cristiano Chies, from ARCHDUE.

“Few people continued to have as much space for something that was little used and served much more as a status symbol at the time.”

The status, by the way, was a big ingredient that the homemade bars served, in addition to martinis, cubas libres and liqueurs. Having one of these at home, more than useful for the residents, was an attraction for visitors.

“These huge bars were an outbreak of collective madness, and they became an institution in homes. At the time, having a bar at home was an ostentation, it showed people’s purchasing power, with the expensive drinks on display, many were not even drinks , were there collecting dust, but it was important to show that there were many bottles and labels”, recalls journalist and presenter specializing in decoration Chris Campos.

If ostentation no longer sets the table (or serves the drink), another component of the mahogany bar era has also melted away like the ice from the 1980s onwards: patriarchy.

After all, bars —even homely ones— have been a male stronghold for decades. Notice that in the description of the post that went viral is the “bartender” who would appear in houses to make a drink, quite consistent with the soap operas of the time, which endlessly reproduced the scene of the executive who loosens his tie when he gets home, goes to the bar household and pours himself a shot of scotch from a crystal decanter.

And, if the huge bars of then would look like white elephants in the usually tiny houses we live in, so does the machismo in bohemian environments. After all, more and more women occupy these spaces not only because they like to drink, but because they enjoy — and know — how to prepare drinks.

The bar has changed and for some changes there is no going back.