This month’s What Matters explores the new culture of the home bar and entertaining—from bars built around personal biography to the death of formal hosting, from jewel-box wet bars tucked into corners to the rise of the listening lounge. We feature four articles sourced from Elle Decor, Veranda, and Livingetc, spotlight two rooms from our Living on the Edgemoor project in Bethesda—a den with a custom vinyl record bar and a media room with both wet and dry bars — and make the case that the best seat in the house might be the one with a drink in its hand.

INVITE ONLY

The best home bars of 2025 had something in common—and it wasn’t marble countertops or backlit shelving. It was character. Elle Decor‘s annual roundup featured bars that felt less like built-ins and more like biographical statements: Brazilian conceptual artist Vik Muniz’s bar in Salvador, where cachaça bottles infused with herbs line the wall and the host—a former Palladium bartender in 1980s New York—still makes the drinks himself. A brass-and-mirror bar in Milan designed by Gilles & Boissier for the Moncler heir. A lean-to outdoor bar at a Jackson Hole ranch that unfolds from the exterior wall like a secret, lined in Ralph Lauren plaid.

What elevates these spaces isn’t budget—it’s biography. Each bar tells a story about who lives there, how they gather, and what they consider worth celebrating. The takeaway for anyone designing an entertaining space: start with who you are, not what’s trending. Read more in Elle Decor

How to make it your own: 
Build your bar around one personal anchor—a spirit you collected on a trip, a piece of barware with a story, a photo from a night worth remembering. The design follows the personality, not the other way around.

LAST CALL FOR FORMALITY

The stuffy dinner party is dead, and nobody is mourning it. Veranda’s 2026 entertaining forecast makes one thing clear: today’s hosts are less interested in milestone celebrations and more invested in recurring, low-key gatherings that feel like acts of devotion rather than events. Sunday supper clubs. Recurring game nights. Cocktail hours with no occasion other than Tuesday. Event designer Allison Jackson describes a shift toward what she calls “the arrival moment”—the idea that the most important design decision in any gathering is what a guest encounters in the first thirty seconds. A lit candle. A place for a coat. A drink already being poured. Soft lighting that draws people inward.

The broader message is that entertaining in 2026 is no longer about performance—it’s about intention. The spaces being designed for these gatherings are warm, layered, and personal. Rooms where hospitality begins not with a centerpiece but with a genuine greeting. Read more in Veranda

How to make it your own: 
Design your next gathering backward — start with the first thirty seconds. What does a guest see, smell, and feel when they arrive? A warm entry, a visible drink station, and somewhere to set their things down will do more for the evening than any centerpiece ever could.

THE JEWEL BOX

The home bar doesn’t need a whole room anymore—it just needs the right corner. Livingetc recently profiled a wave of compact, jewel-box wet bars that are becoming one of the most requested features in living room design. The formula is deceptively simple: a small footprint, high-gloss finishes, paneled refrigerator drawers, and open shelving that doubles as display. One London project wrapped the entire bar nook—walls and ceiling—in a single dramatic wallpaper, creating a space that reads as its own world within the larger room. Mirrors, as always, do the heavy lifting, amplifying light and the illusion of depth.

The appeal is part practical, part theatrical. A jewel-box bar gives the host a stage without dominating the room, and it gives the space a second purpose—cocktail hour at six, quiet reading nook by nine. It’s the smallest renovation with the largest social return. Read more in Livingetc

How to make it your own:
Identify one underused corner or alcove—a dead-end hallway, a shallow closet, an awkward nook beside the fireplace—and commit to it. A single shelf, a surface for mixing, and one bold design choice (a lacquered finish, a statement wallpaper, a brass rail) can turn nothing into the best seat in the house.

DROP THE NEEDLE

Move over bookshelf wealth—there’s a new status symbol in town. Livingetcrecently declared the home record bar one of the defining interior trends of the moment, and it’s easy to see why. Part listening lounge, part cocktail bar, part curated shrine to analog culture, the concept borrows from Japan’s jazz kissa tradition—intimate bars where high-fidelity sound and focused listening shape the entire social experience—and transplants it into the living room. The ingredients are simple: a quality turntable, a wall or shelf of vinyl, warm ambient lighting, and seating arranged not around a screen but around a set of speakers.

What makes the record bar compelling as a design idea—and not just an audiophile indulgence—is how fundamentally it changes the room’s purpose. A space built around listening becomes a space built around presence. The phone goes down. The conversation shifts. The evening slows to the tempo of whatever’s on the platter. In a home culture increasingly saturated with screens and streaming, the deliberate imperfection of a needle on vinyl turns out to be the most luxurious sound of all. Read more in Livingetc

How to make it your own:
You don’t need a rare pressing of Kind of Blue or a five-figure sound system. A decent turntable, a small shelf of records you actually love, and a comfortable chair angled toward the speakers—that’s a listening bar. Let the ritual do the rest.

PROJECT SPOTLIGHT: LIVING ON THE EDGEMOOR

Living on the Edgemoor is a 6,500-square-foot custom residence in Bethesda, Maryland, designed from the earliest concept phase in close collaboration with the architects and clients. Interior Matter led the full interior scope—space planning, custom millwork, furnishings, lighting, and finishes—bringing together warm modernism, layered materials, and smart home technology into a home built for real life.

For this issue, we’re zeroing in on two rooms that distill everything we’ve been talking about. In the den, a record bar with a vinyl collection displayed in custom millwork—the kind of space that makes you want to drop a needle and stay awhile. In the media room, both a wet bar and a dry bar, designed to host any version of the evening the owners have in mind. Three distinct moments of hospitality across two rooms, each built with the kind of intentionality that no app or afterthought can replicate.

Thanks to our amazing partners in virtue, the architects at Studio Z Conceptsand the team at Sandy Spring Builders. See the full project →