One of my favorite features in our dining area is our dry bar! The nice thing about dry bars is that you can put them in your kitchen, dining area, hearth, or even in the living room. It’s a very used space our house. We use it when we host any sort of gathering – we pour drinks there on poker night, we use the counter space as a buffet for holiday dinners. So, when we moved in to our new house, I knew the decor of the dry bar had to be both stylish AND functional. My husband has quite the whiskey bottle collection, so I knew I wanted to feature his most interesting-looking bottles. I put his collection on the middle shelf and decided to work around it.
A trip to my very favorite store, Target, was in need. I found lots of gold bar pieces at Target. Gold was perfect for my space because the pulls on the cabinets and drawers on the dry bar are gold. A cocktail shaker, ice bucket, and drink tools in gold were the perfect accents. I also knew I wanted to incorporate some bartender books (I got Encyclopedia of Cocktails and The Art of Mixology) for my dry bar, which I ended up stacking under the ice bucket to raise it up a little higher. As always, greenery was a must. I added two plants on opposite sides of the bottom and middle shelves. Glassware is also a must on dry bar shelves. I added wine glasses, beer glasses and cocktail glasses. You could also do margarita glasses, Moscow mule copper mugs, etc.
The bar counter top also needed some interesting pieces. I added a raised wine and cheese tray (tray found at Target), a lamp to add light to the area, some layered cutting boards for cheese and appetizer spreads, and some different-sized glass jars full of bar snacks (pretzels, almonds and my kids’ favorite: M&M’s).
I knew I didn’t want the space to look cluttered, so I decided my top shelf decor should be pretty simple. I found some 8×10 frames at Target and bought some bar-themed line art prints on Etsy. I decided to do three frames because, as you may have read in my last post about decorating long floating shelves, I like to divide my shelves into three parts while decorating.
And there you have it! After adding some appetizer plates and a wall basket to add dimension, our dry bar is complete!
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